SOLOMON AND SOLO MONK 



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MONCURE DANIEL CONWAY 



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SOLOMON 



AND 



SOLOMONIC LITERATURE 



MONCURE DANIEL CONWAY 



• CHICAGO 
THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING COMPANY 

London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd. r 

1899 







43095 



COPYRIGHT BY 

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CHICAGO, u. s. A. 

1899 

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INSCRIBED 

TO MY BROTHER OMARIANS 

OF THE 

OMAR KHAYYAM CLUB 
LONDON 



"Seek the circle of the wise : flee a thousand leagues front 
tften without wit. If a wise man give thee poison, dritik it "with- 
out fear; if a fool proffer an antidote^ spill it on the ground." 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Preface ..--... v 

CHAPTER 1 
Solomon -.,-.-- i 

CHAPTER II 
The Judgment of Solomon - - - -12 

CHAPTER III 
The Wives of Solomon .... 24 

CHAPTER IV 
Solomon's Idolatry - - - - - 3o 

CHAPTER V 
Solomon and the Satans . . - . ^i 

CHAPTER VI 
Solomon in the Hexateuch - - - - 41 

CHAPTER VII 
Solomonic Antijahvism .... 51 

CHAPTER VIII 
The Book of Proverbs and the Avesta - "59 

CHAPTER IX 
The Song of Songs ----- 89 

iii 



IV CONTENTS 

PAGE 

CHAPTER X 

KOHELETH (ECCLESIASTES) .... jq^ 

CHAPTER XI 
Wisdom (Ecclesiasticus) - - - - m 

CHAPTER XII 
The Wisdom of Solomon - - - - - ii8 

CHAPTER XIII 

Epistle to the Hebrews (A Sequel to Sophia 

SoLOMONTOs) - - - - - 129 

CHAPTER XIV 
Solomon Melchizedek - . . . . 1^0 

CHAPTER XV 
The Pauline Dehumanization of Jesus - 164 

CHAPTER XVI 

The Mythological Mantle of Solomon Fallen on 

Jesus ...--.. iy6 

CHAPTER XVII 
The Heir of Solomon's Godhead - - 194 

CHAPTER XVIII 
The Last Solomon . . » . . 207 

CHAPTER XIX 

POSTSCRIPTA _.-.,. 234 



PREFACE. 

An English lady of my acquaintance, sojourning at 
Baalbek, was conversing with an humble stonecutter, 
and pointing to the grand ruins inquired, "Why do you 
not occupy yourself with magnificent work like that?" 
"Ah," he said, "those edifices were built by no mortal, 
but by genii." 

These genii now represent the demons which in 
ancient legends were enslaved by the potency of 
Solomon's ring. Some of these folk-tales suggest the 
ingenuity of a fabulist. According to one, Solomon 
outwitted the devils even after his death, which occurred 
while he was leaning on his staff and superintending 
the reluctant labors of the demons on some sacred 
edifice. In that posture his form remained for a year 
after his death, and it was not until a worm gnawed 
the end of his staff, causing his body to fall, that the 
demons discovered their freedom. 

If this be a fable, a modern moral may be found by 
reversing the delusion. The general world has for ages 
been working on under the spell of Solomon while 
believing him to be dead. Solomon is very much alive. 
Many witnesses of his talismanic might can be sum- 
moned from the homes and schools wherein the rod is 
not spared, however much it spoils the child, and where 
youth's "flower of age" bleaches in a puritan cell be- 
cause the "wisest of men" is supposed to have testified 
that all earth's pleasures are vanity. And how many 



vi PREFACE. 

parents are in their turn feeling the recoil of the rod, 
and live to deplore the intemperate thirst for "vanities" 
stimulated in homes overshadowed by the fear-of-God 
wisdom for which Solomon is also held responsible? 
On the other hand, what parson has not felt the rod 
bequeathed to the sceptic by the king whom Biblical 
authority pronounces at once the worldliest and the 
wisest of mankind? 

More imposing, if not more significant, are certain 
picturesque phenomena which to-day represent the 
bifold evolution of the Solomonic legend. While in 
various parts of Europe "Solomon's Seal," survival 
from his magic ring, is the token of conjuring and 
fortune-telling impostors, the knightly Order of Solo- 
mon's Seal in Abyssinia has been raised to moral dig- 
nity by an emperor (Menelik) who has given European 
monarchs a lesson in magnanimity and gallantry by 
presenting to a ''Queen of the South" (Margharita), 
on her birthday, release of the captives who had invaded 
his country. While this is the tradition of nobility 
which has accompanied that of lineal descent from the 
Wise Man, his name lingers in the rest of Christen- 
dom in proverbial connexion with any kind of sagacity, 
while as a Biblical personality he is virtually suppressed. 

In one line of evolution, — whose historic factors have 
been Jahvism, Pharisaism, and Puritanism, — Solomon 
has been made the Adam of a second fall. His Eves 
gave him the fruit that was pleasant and desirable to 
make one wise, and he did eat. Jahveh retracts his 
compliments to Solomon, and makes the naive admis- 
sion that deity itself cannot endow a man with the 
wisdom that can ensure orthodoxy, or with knowledge 



PREFACE. vii 

impregnable by feminine charms (Nehemiah xiii.) ; 
and from that time Solomon disappears from canon- 
ical Hebrew books except those ascribed to his own 
authorship. 

That some writings attributed to Solomon, — espe- 
cially the "Song of Songs" and "Koheleth" (Ecclesi- 
astes), — were included in the canon, may be ascribed 
to a superstitious fear of suppressing utterances of a 
supernatural wisdom, set as an oracle in the king and 
never revoked. This view is confirmed and illustrated 
in several further pages, but it may be added here that 
the very idolatries and alleged sins of Solomon led to 
the detachment from his personal self of his divinely- 
conferred Wisdom, and her personification as some- 
thing apart from him in various avatars (preserving 
his glory while disguising his name), an evolution cul- 
minating in ideals and creeds that have largely moulded 
Christendom. 

The two streams of evolution here suggested, one 
issuing from the wisdom books, the other from the law 
books, are traceable in their collisions, their periods of 
parallelism, and their convergence, — where, however, 
their respective inspirations continue distinguishable, 
like the waters of the Missouri and the Mississippi after 
they flow between the same banks. 

The present essays by no means claim to have fully 
traced these lines of evolution, but aim at their indica- 
tion. The only critique to which it pretends is literary. 
The studies and experiences of many years have left 
me without any bias concerning the contents of the 
Bible, or any belief, ethical or religious, that can be 
affected by the fate of any scripture under the higher 



viii PREFACE. 

or other criticism. But my interest in Biblical litera- 
ture has increased with the perception of its composite 
character ethnically. I believe that I have made a few 
discoveries in it; and a volume adopted as an educa- 
tional text-book requires every ray of light which any 
man feels able to contribute to its interpretation. 



SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 



CHAPTER I. 

SOLOMON. 

There is a vast Solomon mythology: in Palestine, 
Abyssinia, Arabia, Persia, India, and Europe, the myths 
and legends concerning the traditional Wisest Man are 
various, and merit a comparative study they have not 
received. As the name Solomon seems to be allegori- 
cal, it is not possible to discover whether he is mentioned 
in any contemporary inscription by a real name, and the 
external and historical data are insufficient to prove cer- 
tainly that an individual Solomon ever existed.* But 
that a great personality now known under that name 
did exist, about three thousand years ago, will, I believe, 
be recognised by those who study the ancient literature 
relating to him. The earliest and most useful docu- 
ments for such an investigation are : the first collection 
of Proverbs, x-xxii. i6; the second collection, xxv- 
xxix. 27; Psalms ii., xlv., Ixxii., evidently Solomonic; 
2 Samuel xii. 24, 25 ; and i Kings iv. 29-34. 

As, however, the object of this essay is not to prove 
the existence of Solomon, but to study the evolution of 

* The name given to him in 2 Sam. xii, 25, Jedidiah ("beloved of Jah''), by 
the prophet of Jahveh, is, however, an important item in considering the 
question of an actual monarch behind the allegorical name, especially as the 
vnriter of the book, in adding "for Jahveh's sake" seems to strain the sense 
of the name — somewhat as the name " Jesus " is strained to mean saviour in 
Matt, i . 21. Jedidiah looks like a Jahvist modificatioa of a real name (see p. ao). 



2 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

the human heart and mind under influences of which 
a pecuhar series is historically associated with his name, 
he will be spoken of as a genuine figure, the reader being 
left to form his own conclusion as to whether he was 
such, if that incidental point interests him. 

The indirect intimations concerning Solomon in the 
Proverbs and Psalms may be better understood if we 
first consider the historical books which profess to give 
an account of his career. And the search naturally 
begins with the passage in the Book of Kings just 
referred to : 

"And God gave Solomon wisdom and intelligence exceed- 
ing much, and largeness of heart, even as the sand on the 
seashore. And Solomon's wisdom excelled the wisdom of 
all the cliildren of the East, and all the wisdom of Egypt. 
For he was wiser than all men ; than Ethan the Ezrahite, 
and Heman, and Calcol, and Darda, the sons of Mahol ; 
and his fame was in all the surrounding nations. He spake 
three thousand parables, and his songs were a thousand 
and five. He spake of trees, from the cedar of Lebanon to the 
hyssop that springeth out of the wall : he spake also of 
beasts, birds, reptiles, fishes. And there came people of all 
countries to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and from all the 
kings of the earth, which had heard of his wisdom." 

This passage is Elohist: it is the Elohim — perhaps 
here the gods — who gave Solomon wisdom. The intro- 
duction of Jahveh as the giver, in the dramatic dream 
of Chapter iii., alters the nature of the gift, which from 
the Elohim is scientific and literary wisdom, but from 
Jahveh is political, related to government and judgment. 

As for Mahol and his four sons, the despair of Bibli- 
cal historians, they are now witnesses that this passage 
was written when those men,— or perhaps masculine 



SOLOMON. 3 

Muses, — were famous, though they are unknown within 
any period that can be called historical. As intimated, 
they may be figures from some vanished mythology 
Hebraised into Mahol (dance), Ethan (the imperish- 
able), Heman (faithful), Calcol (sustenance) , Darda 
(pearl of knozvledge). 

In speaking of i Kings iv. 29-34 as substantially his- 
torical it is not meant, of course, that it is free from the 
extravagance characteristic of ancient annals, but that 
it is the nearest approach to Solomon's era in the so- 
called historical books, and, although the stage of ideal- 
isation has been reached, is free from the mythology 
which grew around the name of Solomon. 

But while we have thus only one small scrap of 
even quasi-historical writing that can be regarded as 
approaching Solomon's era, the traditions concerning 
him preserved in the Book of Kings yield much that is 
of value when comparatively studied with annals of the 
chroniclers, who modify, and in some cases omit, not to 
say suppress, the earlier record. Such modifications 
and omissions, while interesting indications of Jahvist 
influences, are also testimonies to the strength of the 
traditions they overlay. The pure and simple literary 
touchstone can alone be trusted amid such traditions; 
it alone can distinguish the narratives that have basis, 
that could not have been entirely invented. 

In the Book of Chronicles, — for the division into two 
books was by Christians, as also was the division of the 
Book of Kings, — we find an ecclesiastical work written 
after the captivity, but at different periods and by dif- 
ferent hands ; it is in the historic form, but really does 
not aim at history. The main purpose of the first 
chronicler is to establish certain genealogies and con- 



4 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

quests related to the consecration of the house and line- 
age of David. Solomon's greatness and his building 
of the temple are here transferred as far as possible to 
David.''' David captures from various countries the 
gold, silver, and brass, and dedicates them for use in 
the temple, which he plans in detail, but which Jahveh 
forbade him to build himself. The reason of this pro- 
hibition is far from clear to the first writer on the com- 
pilation, but apparently it was because David was not 
sufficiently highborn and renowned. "I took thee from 
the sheepcote," says Jahveh, but adds, "I will make thee 
a name like unto the name of the great ones that are in 
the earth;" also, says Jahveh, "I will subdue all thine 
enemies." So it is written in i Chronicles xvii., and it 
could hardly have been by the same hand that in xxii. 
wrote David's words to Solomon : 

"It was in my heart to build an house to the name of Jahveh 
my God ; but the word of Jahveh came to me, saying : "Thou 
shalt not build an house unto my name, because thou hast 
shed much blood upon the earth in my sight ; behold a son shall 
be born unto thee who shall be a man of rest, and I will 
give him rest from all his enemies round about: for his name 
shall be Solomon [Peaceful], and I will give peace and 
quietness unto Israel in his days : he shall build an house for 
my name: and he shall be my son, and I will be his father; 
and I will establish the throne of his kingdom over Israel 
for ever.' " 

In Chapter xvii. Jahveh claims that it is he who has 
subdued and cut off David's enemies ; his long speech 
is that of a war-god ; but in the xxii. it is the God of 
Peace who speaks ; and in harmony with this character 

* This was continued in rabbinical and Persian superstitions, which 
attribute to David knowledge of the language of birds. It is said David 
invented coats of mail, the iron becoming as wax in his hands ; he subjected 
the winds to Solomon, and also a pearl-diving demon. 



SOLOMON. 5 

all the bloodshed by which Solomon's succession was 
accompanied, as recorded in the Book of Kings, is sup- 
pressed, and he stands to the day of his death the Prince 
of Peace. To him (i Chron. xxviii., xxix.) from the 
first all the other sons of David bow submissively, and 
the people by a solemn election confirm David's appoint- 
ment and make Solomon their king. 

Thus, I Chron. xvii., which is identical with 2 Sam. 
vii., clearly represents a second Chronicler. The hand 
of the same writer is found in i Chron. xviii., xix., xx., 
and the chapters partly identical in 2 Samuel, namely 
viii., X., xi. ; the offence of David then being narrated 
in 2 Samuel xii. as the wrong done Uriah, whereas in 
I Chron. xxi. the sin is numbering Israel. The Chroni- 
clers know nothing of the Uriah and Bathsheba story, 
but the onomatopoeists may take note of the fact that 
David's order was to number Israel "from Beer-sheba 
unto Dan." 

The first ten chapters of 2 Chronicles seem to repre- 
sent a third chronicler. Here we find David in the 
background, and Solomon completely conventionalised, 
as the Peaceful Prince of the Golden Age. All is pros- 
perity and happiness. Solomon even anticipates the 
silver millennium : "The king made silver to be in Jeru- 
salem as stones." It is only when the fourth chronicler 
begins (2 Chron. x.), with the succession of Solomon's 
son Rehoboam, that we are told anything against Solo- 
mon. Then all Israel come to the new king, saying, 
"Thy father made our yoke grievous," and he answers, 
"My father chastised you with whips, but I with 
scorpions." 

All this is so inconsistent with the accounts in the 
earlier books of both David and Solomon, that it is 



6 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

charitable to believe that the third chronicler had never 
heard the ugly stories about these two canonised kings. 

In the First Book of Kings, Solomon is made king 
against the rightful heir, by an ingenious conspiracy 
between a wily prophet, Nathan, and a wily beauty, 
Bathsheba, — Solomon's mother, whom David had ob- 
tained by murdering her husband. 

It may be remembered here that David had by Bath- 
sheba a son named Nathan (2 Sam. v. 14; i Chron. iii. 
5), elder brother of Solomon, from whom Luke traces 
the genealogy of Joseph, father of Jesus, while Mat- 
thew traces it from Solomon. It appears curious that 
the prophet Nathan should have intrigued for the acces- 
sion of the younger brother rather than the one bearing 
his own name. It will be seen, however, by reference 
to 2 Samuel xii. 24, that Solomon was the first legiti- 
mate child of David and Bathsheba, the son of their 
adultery having died. John Calvin having laid it down 
very positively that "if Jesus was not descended from 
Solomon, he was not the Christ," some theologians have 
resorted to the hypothesis that Nathan married an 
ancestress of the Virgin Mary, and that Luke gives her 
descent, not that of Joseph ; but apart from the fact 
that Luke (iii. 23) begins with Joseph, it is difficult to 
see how the requirement of Calvin, that Solomon should 
be the ancestor of Jesus, is met by his mother's descent 
from Solomon's brother. It is clear, however, from 
2 Sam. xii. 24, 25, that this elder brother of Solomon, 
Nathan, is a myth. Otherwise he, and not Solomon, was 
the lawful heir to the throne (legitimacy being confined 
to the sons of David born in Jerusalem), and Jesus 
would not have been "born King of the Jews" (Matt, 
i. 2), nor fulfilled the Messianic conditions. It is even 



SOLOMON. 7 

possible that Luke wished to escape the implication of 
illegitimacy by tracing the descent of Jesus from Solo- 
mon's elder brother. But the writer of i Kings i. had 
no knowledge of the Christian discovery that, in the 
order of legal succession to the throne, the sons of 
David born before he reigned in Jerusalem were 
excluded. Adonijah's legal right of succession was 
not questioned by David ( i Kings i. 6.) 

When David was in his dotage and near his end this 
eldest son (by Haggith), Adonijah, began to consult 
leading men about his accession, but unfortunately for 
himself, did not summon Nathan. This slighted "pro- 
phet" proposed to Bathsheba that she should go to 
David and tell him the falsehood that he (David) had 
once sworn before Jahveh that her son Solomon should 
reign ; ''and while you are talking," says Nathan, "I will 
enter and fulfil" (that was his significant word) "your 
declaration." The royal dotard could not gainsay two 
seemingly independent vv^itnesses, and helplessly kept 
the alleged oath. David announced this oath as his 
reason, — apparently the only one, — for appointing Solo- 
mon. The prince may be credited with being too young 
to participate in this scheme. 

Irregularity of succession and of birth in princes 
appeals to popular superstition. The legal heir, regu- 
larly born, seems to come by mere human arrangement, 
but the God-appointed chieftain is expected in unex- 
pected ways and in defiance of human laws and even 
moralities. David, or some one speaking for him, said, 
"In sin did my mother conceive me," and the contempt 
in which he was held by his father's other children, and 
his father's keeping him out of sight till the prophet 
demanded him ( i Sam. xvi. 1 1 ), look as if he, also, may 



8 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

have been illegitimate. Solomon may have been tech- 
nically legitimate, but in any case he v^as the son of 
an immoral marriage, sealed by a husband's blood. 
The populace vv^ould easily see the divine hand in the 
elevation of this youth, who seems to have been himself 
impressed v^ith the like superstition. 

Unfortunately, Solomon received his father's last 
injunctions as divine commands. At the very time 
when David is pictured by the Chronicler in such a 
saintly death-bed scene, parting so pathetically with his 
people, and giving such unctuous and virtuous last 
counsels to Solomon, he is shown by the historian of 
Kings pouring into his successor's ear the most treach- 
erous and atrocious directions for the murder of certain 
persons; among others, of Shimei, whose life he had 
sworn should not be taken. Shimei had once called 
David what Jahveh also called him, a man of blood, but 
afterwards asked his forgiveness. Under a pretence 
of forgiveness, David nursed his vengeance through 
many years, and Shimei was now a white-haired man. 
David's last words addressed to Solomon were these: 

"He (Shimei) came down to meet me at Jordan, and I 
sware to him by Jahveh, saying, 'I will not put thee to death 
with the sword.' Now therefore hold him not guiltless, for 
thou art a wise man, and wilt know what thou oughtest to do 
unto him ; and thou shalt bring his hoar head down to the 
grave in blood." 

Such, according to an admiring annalist, were the 
last words uttered by David on earth. He died with 
a lie in his mouth (for he had sworn to Shimei, plainly, 
"Thy life shall not be taken"), and with murder (per- 
sonal and vindictive) in his heart. The book' opens 
with a record that they had tried to revive the aged king 



SOLOMON. 9 

by bringing to him a beautiful damsel ; but lust was 
gone ; the only passion that survived even his lust, and 
could give one more glow to this "man of blood," was 
vengeance. Two aged men were named by him for 
death at the hands of Solomon, who could not disobey, 
this being the last act of the forty years of reign of King 
David. His dying word was "blood." One would be 
glad to believe these things mythical, but they are con- 
tained in a record which says : 

"David did that which was right in the sight of Jahveh 
and turned not aside from anything that he commanded him 
all the days of his life, save only in the matter of Uriah the 
Hittite." 

This traditional incident of getting Uriah slain in 
order to appropriate his wife, made a deep impression 
on the historian of Samuel, and suspicious pains are 
taken (2 Sam. xii.) to prove that the illegitimate son of 
David and Bathsheba was "struck by Jahveh" for his 
parents' sin, and that Solomon was born only after the 
marriage. Even if the youth was legitimate, the adher- 
ents of the king's eldest son, Adonijah, would not fail 
to recall the lust and murder from which Solomon 
sprang, though the populace might regard these as 
signs of Jahveh's favor. In the coronation ode 
(Psalm ii.) the young king is represented as if answer- 
ing the Legitimists who spoke of his birth not only 
from an adulteress, but one with a foreign name : 

"I will proclaim the decree : 
The Lord said unto me, 'Thou art my son ; 
This day have I begotten thee.' " 

(It is probable that the name Jahveh was inserted in 
this song in place of Elohim, and in several other 



lO SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

phrases there are indications that the original lias been 
tampered with.) The hnes — 

"Kiss the son lest he be angry 
And ye perish straightway." 

and others, may have originated the legendary par- 
ticulars of plots caused by Solomon's accession, 
recorded in the Book of Kings, but at any rate the 
emphatic claim to his adoption by God as His son, by 
the anointing received at coronation, suggests some 
trouble arising out of his birth. There is also a con- 
fidence and enthusiasm in the language of the court 
laureate, as the writer of Psalm ii. appears to have been, 
which conveys an impression of popular sympathy. 

It is not improbable that the superstition about ille- 
gitimacy, as under some conditions a sign of a hero's 
heavenly origin, may have had some foundation in the 
facts of heredity. In times when love or even passion 
had little connexion with any marriage, and none with 
royal marriages, the offspring of an amour might natur- 
ally manifest more force of character than the legiti- 
mate, and the inherited sensual impulses, often dis- 
played in noble energies, might prove of enormous 
importance in breaking down an old oppression con- 
tinued by an automatic legitimacy of succession. 

In Talmudic books {Moed Katon, Vol. 9, col. 2, and 
Midrash Rahhah, ch. 15) it is related that when Solo- 
mon was conveying the ark into the temple, the doors 
shut themselves against him of their own accord. He 
recited twenty-four psalms, but they opened not. In 
vain he cried, ''Lift up your heads, O ye gates !" But 
when he prayed, "O Lord God, turn not Thy face from 
Thine anointed; remember the mercies of David thy 



SOLOMON. II 

servant" (2 Chron. vi. 42), the gates flew open. "Then 
the enemies of David turned black in the face, for all 
knew that God had pardoned David's transgression with 
Bathsheba." This legend curiously ignores i Chron. 
xxii., which shows that Jahveli had prearranged Solo- 
mon's birth and name, and had adopted him before 
birth. It is one of many rabbinical intimations that 
David, Bathsheba, Uriah, and Solomon, had become 
popular divinities, — much like Vulcan, Venus, Mars, — 
and as such relieved from moral obligations. Jewish 
theology had to accommodate itself ethically tO' this 
popular mythology, and did so by a theory of divine 
forgiveness ; but really the position of Hebrew, as well 
as Christian, orthodoxy was that lustful David and 
Bathsheba were mere puppets in the divine plan, and 
their actions quite consistent with their being souls after 
Jahveh's own heart. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE JUDGMENT OF SOLOMON. 

It may occur to mythographers that I treat as histor- 
ical narratives and names that cannot be taken so seri- 
ously ; but in a study of primitive culture, fables become 
facts and evidences. A grand harvest awaits that mas- 
ter of mythology and folklore who shall bravely explore 
the legends of David and Solomon, but in the present 
essay mythical details can only be dealt with inci- 
dentally. Some of these may be considered at the 
outset. 

It is said in i Kings i. : 

''Now King David was old and stricken in years ; and they 
covered him with clothes, but he gat no heat. Wherefore his 
servants said unto him, Let there be sought for my lord the 
king a young virgin : and let her stand before the king, and 
cherish him; and let her lie in thy bosom, that my lord the 
king may get heat. So they sought for a fair damsel through- 
out all the coasts of Israel, and found Abishag the Shunammite, 
and brought her to the king. And the damsel was very fair ; 
and she cherished the king and ministered to him; but the 
king knew her not." 

That this story is characteristic of lustful David can- 
not blind us to the fact of its improbability. Whatever 
may be meant by "the coasts of Israel," the impression 
is conveyed of a long journey, and it is hardly credible 
that so much time should be taken for a moribund 
monarch. Many interpretations are possible of the 

12 



THE JUDGMENT OF SOLOMON. 1 3 

name Abishag, but it is usually translated "Father (or 
source) of error." However this may be, the story 
bears a close resemblance to the search for a wife for 
Isaac. When Abraham sent out this commission he 
also "was old and well stricken in age," and of Rebekah 
it is said, "The damsel was very fair to look upon, a 
virgin, neither had any man known her." (Gen. 
xxiv.) Rebekah means "ensnarer," and Abishag 
"father (source) of error"; and both women cause 
trouble between two brothers. 

There is an Oriental accent about both of these sto- 
ries. In ancient Indian literature there are several 
instances of servants sent out to search the world for a 
damsel fair and wise enough to wed the son and heir of 
some grand personage. Maya, the mother of Buddha, 
was sought for in the same way. This of itself is not 
enough to prove that the Biblical narratives in question 
are of Oriental origin, but there is a Tibetan tale which 
contains several details which seem to bear on this point. 
The tale is that of Visakha, and it is accessible to Eng- 
lish readers in a translation by Schiefner and Ralston of 
the "Kah-Gyur." (Triibner's Oriental Series.) 

Visakha was the seventh son of Mrgadhara, prime 
minister of the king of Kosala. For this youth a bride 
was sought by a Brahman, who in the land of Champa 
found a beautiful maiden whose name was also Visakha. 
She was, with other girls, entering a park, where they 
all bathed in a tank, — her companions taking off their 
clothes, but Visakha lifting her dress by degrees as she 
entered the water. Besides showing decorum, this 
maiden conducted herself differently from the others in 
everything, some of her actions being mysterious. The 
Brahman, having contrived to meet her alone, ques- 



14 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

tioned her concerning these pecuHarities, for all of 
which she gave reasons implying exceptional wisdom 
and virtue. On his return the Brahman described this 
maiden to the prime minister, who set forth and asked 
her hand for his son, and she was brought to Kosala on 
a ship with great pomp. The maiden then for a long 
time gives evidence of extraordinary wisdom, one 
example being of special importance to our inquiry. 
She determines which of two women claiming a child 
is the real mother. The king and his ministers being 
unable to settle the dispute, Visakha said : 

"Speak to the two women thus: 'As we do not know to 
which of you two the boy belongs, let her who is the strongest 
take the boy.' When each of them has taken hold of one of 
the boy's hands, and he begins to cry out on account of the 
pain, the real mother will let go, being full of compassion for 
him, and knowing that if her child remains alive she will be 
able to see it again ; but the other, who has no compassion for 
him, will not let go. Then beat her with a switch, and she will 
thereupon confess the truth of the whole matter." 

In comparing this with the famous judgment of 
Solomon there appear some reasons for believing the 
Oriental tale to be the earlier. In the Biblical tale 
there is evidently a missing link. Why should the false 
mother, who had so desired the child, consent to have it 
cut in two ? What motive could she have ? But in the 
Tibetan tale one of the women is the wife, the other the 
concubine, of a householder. The wife bore him no 
child, and was jealous of the concubine on account of 
her babe. The concubine, feeling certain that the wife 
would kill the child, gave it tO' her, with her lord's 
approval ; but after his death possession of the house 
had to follow motherhood of the child. If, however, 



THE JUDGMENT OF SOLOMON. 1 5 

the child were dead, the false claimant would be mis- 
tress of the house. Here, then, is a motive wanting in 
the story of Solomon, and suggesting that the latter is 
not the original. 

In the ancient ''Mahosadha Jataka" the false claimant 
proves to be a Yakshini (a sort of siren and vampire) 
who wishes to eat the child. To Buddha himself is 
here ascribed the judgment, which is much the same as 
that of the "wise Champa maiden," Visakha. Here, 
also, is a motive for assenting to the child's death or 
injury which is lacking in the Biblical story. 

Here, then, we find in ancient Indian literature a tale 
which m.ay be fairly regarded as the origin of the 
"Judgment of Solomon." And it belongs to a large 
number of Oriental tales in which the situations and 
accents of the Biblical narratives concerning David and 
Solomon often occur. There is a cave-born youth, 
Asuga, son of a Brahman and a bird-fairy, with a 
magic lute which accompanies his verses, and who 
dallies with Brahmadetta's wife. A king, enamored 
of a beautiful foreign woman beneath him in rank, 
obtains her by a promise that her son, if one is born, 
shall succeed him on the throne, to the exclusion of his 
existing heir by his wife of equal birth ; but he permits 
arrangements for his elder son's succession to go on 
until induced by a threat of war from the new wife's 
father and country to fulfil his promise. A prime min- 
ister, Mahaushadha, travels, in disguise of a Brahman, 
in order to find a true wife ; he meets with a witty 
maiden (Visakha), who directs him to her village by 
a road where he will see her naked at a bathing tank, 
though she had taken another road. This minister was, 
like David, lowly born ; a "deity" revealed him to the 



l6 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE, 

king, as Jahveh revealed David to Samuel ; he was a 
seventh minister, as David was a seventh son, and Solo- 
mon also. 

Although the number seven was sacred among the 
ancient Hebrews, it does not appear to have been con- 
nected by them with exceptional wisdom or occult pow- 
ers in man or woman. The ideas in which such legends 
as "The Seven Wise Masters," 'The Seven Sages," 
and the superstition about a seventh son's second- 
sight, originate, are traceable to ancient Indo-Iranian 
theosophy. It may be useful here to read the subjoined 
extract from Darm.esteter's introduction to the "Vendi- 
dad." Having explained that the religion of the Per- 
sian Magi is derived from the same source as that of 
the Indian Risliis, that is, from the common forefathers 
of both Iranian and Indian, he says : 

"The Indo-Iranian Asura (the supreme but not the only god) 
was often conceived as sevenfold : by the play of certain 
mythical formulae and the strength of certain mythical num- 
bers, the ancestors of the Indo-Iranians had been led to speak 
of seven worlds, and the supreme god was often made seven- 
fold, as well as the worlds over which he ruled. The names 
and the attributes of the seven gods had not been as yet 
defined, nor could they be then; after the separation of the 
two religions, these gods, named Aditya, 'the infinite ones,' 
in India, were by and by identified there with the sun, and 
their number was afterward raised to twelve, to correspond 
to the twelve aspects of the sun. In Persia, the seven gods 
are known as Amesha Spentas, 'the undying and well-doing 
one'; they by and by, according to the new spirit that 
breathed in the religion, received the names of the deified 
abstractions, Vohu-mano (good thought), Asha Vahista 
(excellent holiness), Khshathra Vairya (perfect sovereignty), 
Spenta xA^rmaiti (divine piety), Haurvatat and Ameretaot 
(health and immortality). The first of them all was and 
remained Ahura Mazda; but whereas formerly he had been 



THE JUDGMENT OF SOLOMON. 17 

only the first of them, he was now their father. 'I invoke the 
glory of the Aniesha Spentas, who all seven have one and the 
same thinking, one and the same speaking, one and the same 
father and lord, Ahura Mazda.' " (Yast xix. 16.)* 

In Persian religion the Seven are always wise and 
beneficent. The vast folklore derived from this Parsi 
religion included the Babylonian belief in seven power- 
ful spirits, associated with the Pleiades, beneficent at 
certain seasons, but normally malevolent : they all move 
together, taking possession of human beings, as in the 
case of the seven demons cast out of Mary Magdalene. 
In Egypt the seven are always evil. But neither of 
these sevens are especially clever. In Buddhist legends 
they are not so carefully classified, the seventh son or 
daughter manifesting exceptional powers, sometimes of 
good, sometimes of evil, but they are usually referred 
to for this wit or wisdom. In the Davidian and Solo- 
monic legends these notions are found as if merely 
adhering to some importation, and without any percep- 
tion of the significance of the number seven. David 
is an eighth son in i Sam. xvi. 10-13, but a seventh son 
in I Chron. ii. 16.- Solomon is a tenth son in i Chron. 
iii. 1-6, but the seventh legitimate son in 2 Sam. xii. 
24-25. The word Sheba means "the seven," but the 
early scribes appear to have understood is as shaha, "he 
swears," as in Gen. xxi. 30-31, where after the seven 
ewe lambs have given the well its name. Beer sheba, it is 
ascribed the significance of an oath. Bathsheba is 
commonly translated "Daughter of the Oath," but there 
can be little doubt that the name means "Daughter of 
the Seven," and that it originated in the astute tricks 

* Sacred Books of the East. Edited by F. Max Miiller. Vol. IV. The 
Zend-Avesta. Parti. The Vendidad. Translated by James Darmesteter. 
P. lix., et seq. 



1 8 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

by which that fair foreigner made herself queen- 
mother and her son king, above the lawful heir, whom 
she was instrumental (perhaps purposely) in getting 
out of the way by furthering his wishes. 

Moral obliquities are little considered in these fair 
favorites of translunary powers. Visakha, in one 
Buddhist tale, gets herself chosen by the Brahman as 
bride of a great man by her care to veil her charms at 
the bath ; in another tale she attracts a prime minister 
in disguise, and becomes his wife, partly by laying aside 
all of her clothing at a bathing tank where she knows he 
will see her. Bathsheba's fame is similarly various. 
Her nudity and ready adultery with the king did not 
prevent her from passing into Talmudic tradition as 
"blessed among women," and to her was even ascribed 
the beautiful chapter of Proverbs (xxxi.) in praise of 
the virtuous wife ! In the "Wisdom of Solomon" she 
is described as the "handmaiden" of the Lord in antici- 
pation of the Christian ideal of immaculate womanhood. 

A similar development might no doubt be traced in 
the beautiful story of Visakha of Shravasti, the most 
famous of the female lay-disciples of Buddha. The 
queries put to her by Buddha and her explanations of 
her petitions, which had appeared enigmatic, are related 
in Carus's Gospel of Buddha, and in form correspond 
with the very different questions and solutions that 
passed between the Brahman and the Tibetan Visakha, 
already mentioned. The name Visakha, from a Sans- 
krit root, meaning to divide, came to mean selection 
and intelligence, of all kinds, but in the matron of 
Shravasti wit becomes the genius of charity, and clever- 
ness expands to enlightenment. 

The Queen of Sheba, — "Queen of the Seven," — is a 



THE JUDGMENT OF SOLOMON. 19 

sister spirit of this lay-disciple. Whatever truth may 
underlie the legends of this lady, there is little doubt of 
her legendary relation to the Wise Women of Budd- 
hist parables, — to Visakha of the sevenfold wisdom; 
and of her who decided between the rival claimants to 
the same child; to Ambapali, the courtesan, who jour- 
neyed to hear Buddha's wisdom and presented to him 
and his disciples her park and mansion; and to the 
Queen of Glory, whose story belongs "to a very early 
period in the history of Buddhism." Such is the opin- 
ion of Mr. Rhys Davids, whose translation of the 
Mahdsudassana-Sutta, containing an account of the 
queen's visit to the King of Glory, in his Palace of 
Justice, attended by her fourfold army, may be read 
in Vol. XL, p. 2^6, of Sacred Books of the East. 

This exaltation of human knowledge and wisdom, 
travelling to find it, testing it with riddles and questions, 
belongs to the cult of the Magus and the Pundit. 

With reference to the seventh son Visakha (all- 
potential) and his all-wise bride Visakha, a notable 
parallelism is found in the substantial identity of "Solo- 
mon" and "the Shunnamite," on account of whom he 
slew his brother Adonijah. Shunnamite is equivalent 
to Shulamite, substantially the same as Solomon (peace- 
ful), but here probably meaning that she was a "Solo- 
moness," a very wise woman. That such was her repu- 
tation appears by the "Song of Songs." 

An equally striking comparison may be made between 
the naming of Solomon and the naming of Mahaus- 
hadha, the Tibetan "Solomon" already mentioned as 
having married a wise Visakha. Among the many 
proofs of wisdom given by this village-born youth was 
the discovery of the real husband of a woman claimed 



20 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

by two men. One of the men being much the weaker, 
there could be no such trial as that proposed in the 
child's case by Visakha. Mahaushadha questioned the 
two men as to what they had last eaten, then made 
them vomit, and so found out which had told the truth. 
Let us compare this Tibetan minister's birth with that 
of Solomon : 

"When the boy came into the world and his birth-feast was 
celebrated, the name of Mahaushadha (Great Remedy) was 
given to him at the request of his mother, inasmuch as she, who 
had long suffered from illness, and had been unable to obtain 
relief from the time of the boy's conception, had been cured 
by him." (Tib. Tales, p. 133.) 

"And Jahveh struck the child that Uriah's wife bare unto 
David, and .... on the seventh day [it was the seventh 

son] the child died And David comforted Bathsheba 

his wife, and went in unto her, and lay with her ; and she 
bare a son, and she called his name Solomon. And Jahveh 
loved him ; and he sent by the hand of Nathan the prophet, 
and he called his name Jedidiah [Beloved of Jah] for Jahveh's 
sake." (2 Sam. xii.) 

In the Revised Version "she called" is given in the 
margin as "another reading," but that it is the right 
reading appears by the context: it was she that was 
"comforted," and in her babe she found "rest" — which 
"Solomon" strictly means. Among the Hebrews the 
naming of a child was an act of authority, and it is 
difficult to believe that in any purely Hebrew narrative 
a woman would be described as setting aside the name 
given by Jahveh himself. But the high position of 
woman in the Iranian and the Buddhist religions is 
well known. 

In comparative studies the questions to be deter- 
mined concerning parallel incidents are — whether they 



THE JUDGMENT OF SOLOMON. 21 

are trivial coincidences ; whether they are not based 
in such Uiniversal behcfs or simple facts that they may 
have been of independent origin ; whether the historic 
conditions of time and place admit of any supposed 
borrowing ; if borrowing occurred, which is the origi- 
nal? With regard to the above parallelisms I sub- 
mit that one of them, at least, — the Judgment of Solo- 
mon, — is neither trivial nor based in simple facts, and 
could not have originated independently of the Indian 
tale; that the others, though each, if it stood alone, 
might be a mere coincidence, are too numerous to be 
so explained ; that the time and conditions which ren- 
dered it possible that the names of the apes and pea- 
cocks (i Kings X. 22) imported by Solomon should be 
Indian proves the possibility of importations of tales 
from the same country. (See Rhys David's Buddhist 
Birth Stories, p. xlvii.) 

The question remaining to be determined — which 
region was the borrower — cannot be settled, in the pres- 
ent cases, by the relative antiquity of the books in which 
they are found ; not only are the ages of all the books, 
Hebrew and Oriental, doubtful, but they are all largely 
made up of narratives long anterior to their compila- 
tion. The safest method, therefore, must be study of 
the intrinsic character of each narrative with a view to 
discovering the country to whose intellectual and social 
fauna and flora, so to say, it is most related, and which 
of the stories bears least of the faults incidental to 
translation. I have applied this touchstone to the 
above examples, and believe that the Oriental stories 
are the originals. The Judgment of Solomon appears 
to me to have lost an essential link, a motif, which it 
retains in Buddhist versions. And I do not believe that 



22 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

any Hebrew Bathsheba could have set aside a name 
given her child by a prophet, in the name of Jahveh, in 
order to celebrate by another name the ''rest" she found 
from her sorrows. 

On the other hand, the borrowings by other coun- 
tries from the legend of Solomon appear much more 
numerous. In some cases, as the legend of Jemshid, 
there appear to have been exchanges between the two 
great sages, but the Solomonic traditions seem pre- 
ponderant in Vikramadatsya, the demon-commanding 
hero of India. Solomon became a proverb of wisdom 
and liberality in Abyssinia, Arabia, and Persia. Ideal 
Sulaimans and Solimas abound. Solomon has influ- 
enced the legends of m.any heroes, such as Haroun- 
Alraschid and Charlemagne, and I will even venture 
a suspicion that the fame, and perhaps the name, of 
Solon have been influenced by the legend of Solomon. 
Lexicographers give no account of Solon's name ; he 
is assigned to a conjectural period before written Greek 
existed ; his interviews with Croesus, given in Herodo- 
tus, are hopelessly unhistorical, and his moralisings to 
the rich man recall the book of Proverbs. The Solon 
of Plato's Critias is already a mythological voyager, a 
Sindebad-Solomon, and his romance of the lost Atlan- 
tis is like an idealised rumour of the Wise Man's King- 
dom. Solon's "history" was developed by Plutarch, 
seven centuries after the era assigned to the sage, out of 
poetical fragments ascribed to him, and he is rep- 
resented as a great trader and traveller in the regions 
associated with Solomon. It is doubtful whether this 
chief of the Seven Sages, whose Solomonic motto Vv^as 
"Know Thyself" (cf. Prov. xiv. 8), could he reappear, 



THE JUDGMENT OF SOLOMON. 2^ 

would know himself as historically costumed by writers 
in our era, from Plutarch to Grote. 

At any rate there is little doubt of a reference to the 
Seven Spentas or to the Seven Sages in Proverbs ix. i : 

"Wisdom hath biiilded her house, 
She hath hewn out her seven pillars." 



CHAPTER III. 

THE WIVES OF SOLOMON. 

According to the first book of Kings, Solomon's half- 
brother, Adonijah, after the defeat of an alleged (per- 
haps mythical) effort to recover the throne of which 
he had been defrauded, submitted himself to Solomon. 
He had become enamored of the virgin who had been 
brought to the aged King David to try to revive some 
vitality in him ; and he came to Bathsheba asking her 
to request her son the king to give him this damsel as 
his wife. Bathsheba proffered this "small petition" 
for Adonijah, but Solomon was enraged, and ironically 
suggested that she should ask the kingdom itself for 
Adonijah, whom he straightway ordered to execu- 
tion. The immediate context indicates that Solomon 
suspected in this petition a plot against his throne. A 
royal father's harem was inherited by a royal son, and 
its possession is supposed to have involved certain 
rights of succession : this is the only interpretation I 
have ever heard of the extreme violence of Solomon. 
But I have never been satisfied with this explanation. 
Would Adonijah have requested, or Bathsheba asked 
as a "small" thing, a favor touching the king's tenure? 

The story as told in the Book of Kings appears diplo- 
matic, and several details suggest that in some earlier 
legend the strife between the half-brothers had a more 

24 



THE WIVES OF SOLOMON. 25 

romantic relation to "Abishag the Shunammite," who 
is described as "very fair." 

Abishag is interpreted as meaning "father of error," 
and though' that translation is of doubtful accuracy, its 
persistence indicates the place occupied by her in early 
tradition. According to Yalkiit Reubeni the soul of 
Eve transmigrated into her. She caused trouble be- 
tween the brothers, whose Jahvist nam.es, Adonijah and 
Jedidiah, — strength of Jah, and love of Jah, — seem to 
have been at some time related. However this may be, 
the fair Shunammite, as represented in the Shulamite of 
the Song of Songs, fills pretty closely the outlines set 
forth in the famous epithalamium (Psalm xlv.) which 
all critics, I believe, refer to Solomon's marriage with 
a bride brought from some far country. I quote (with 
a few alterations hereafter discussed) the late Pro- 
fessor Newman's translation, in which it will be seen 
that several lines are applicable to the Shunammite, 
whose humble position is alluded to, separated from 
her "people," and her "father's house" : 

"My heart boils up with goodly matter. 
I ponder ; and my verse concerns the King. 
Let my tongue be a ready writer's pen. 

"Fairer art thou than all the sons of men. 
Over thy Hps delightsomeness is poured : 
Therefore hath God forever blessed thee. 

"Gird at thy hip thy hero sword, 
Thy glory and thy majesty: 
And forth victorious ride majestic, 
For truth and meekness, righteously ; 
And let thy right hand teach the wondrous deeds. 
Beneath thy feet the peoples fall ; 
For in the heart of the king's enemies 
Sharp are thy arrows. 



V 



26 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

"Thy throne, O God, ever and always stands ; 
A righteous sceptre is thy royal sceptre. 
Thou lovest right and hatest evil ; 
Therefore, O God, thy God hath anointed thee 
With oil of joy above thy fellow-kings. 
Myrrh, aloes, cassia, all thy raiment is. 
From ivory palaces the viols gladden thee. 
King's daughters count among thy favorites ; 
And at thy right hand stands the Queen 
In Gold of Ophir. 

"O daughter, hark ! behold and bend thy ear : 
Forget thy people and thy father's house. 
Win thou the King thy beauty to desire ; 
He is thy lord ; do homage unto him. 
So Tyrus's daughter and the sons of wealth 
With gifts shall court thee. 

"Right glorious is the royal damsel ; 
Wrought of gold is her apparel. 
In broidered tissues to the King she is led : 
Her maiden-friends, behind, are brought to thee. 
They come with joy and gladness. 
They enter the royal palace. 

"Thy fathers by their sons shall be replaced ; 
As princes o'er the land shalt thou exalt them. 
So will I publish to all times thy name ; 
So shall the nations praise thee, now and always." 

In this epithalamium the name of Jahveh does not 
occur, and Solomon himself is twice addressed as God 
(Elohim). This lack of anticipation was avenged by 
Jahvism when it arrived ; the Song- was put among the 
Psalms and transmitted to British Jahvism, which has 
headed it: "The majesty and grace of Christ's king- 
dom. The duty of the Church and the benefits thereof." 
Such is the chapter-heading to a song of bridesmaids, — 



THE WIVES OF SOLOMON. 27 

described in the original as *'a song of loves" and "set 
to lilies" (a tune of the time). 

There are no indications in the Solomon legend, apart 
from some mistranslations, until the time of Ecclesias- 
ticus (B. C. 180), that Solomon was a sensualist, or 
that there were any moral objections to the extent of 
his harem, which indeed is expanded by his historians 
with evident pride. 

As to this, our own monogamic ideas are quite in- 
applicable to a period when personal affection had noth- 
ing to do with marriage, when women had no means of 
independent subsistence, and the size of a man's harem 
was the measure of his benevolence. Probably there 
was then no place more enviable for a woman than 
Solomon's seraglio. 

The sin was not in the size of the seraglio but in its 
foreign and idolatrous wives. (Here our translators 
again get in an innuendo against Solomon by turning 
"foreign" into "strange women.") Before a religious 
notion can get itself fixed as law it is apt to be enforced 
by an extra amount of odium. Solomon's mother had 
married a Hittite, and presumably he would have im- 
bibed liberal ideas on such subjects. The round num- 
ber of a thousand ladies in his harem is unhistorical, 
but that the chief princesses were of Gentile origin and 
religion is clear. The second writer in the first Book 
of Kings begins (xi.) with this gravamen: 

"Now King Solomon loved many foreign women besides 
the daughter of Pharaoh, — Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite, 
Zidonian, and Hittite women, nations concerning which 
Jahveh said to the children of Israel, Ye shall not go among 
them, neither shall they come among you : for surely they 
will turn away your heart after their gods : Solomon clave to 
these in love." 



28 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

The wisest of men could hardly attend to rules which 
an unconceived Jahveh would lay down for an unborn 
nation centuries later. We must, however, as we are 
not on racial problems, consent to a few anachronisms 
in names if we are to discover any credible traditions 
in the Biblical books relating to Solomon. As Mr. 
Flinders Petrie has discovered something like the word 
** Israel" in ancient Egypt, it may be as well to use that 
word tentatively for the tribe we are considering. No 
Israelite, then, is mentioned among Solomon's wives, 
and one can hardly imagine such a man finding a bride 
among devotees of an altar of unhewn stones piled in 
a tent. 

As our cosmopolitan prince had to send abroad for 
workmen of skill, he may also have had to seek abroad 
for ladies accomplished enough to be his princesses. 
That, however, does not explain the number and variety 
of the countries from which the wives seem to have 
come. The theory of many scholars that this Prince 
of Peace substituted alliances by marriage for military 
conquests is confirmed in at least one instance. The 
mother of his only son, Rehoboam, was Naamah the 
Ammonitess (i Kings xiv. 31), and the Septuagint 
preserves an addition to this verse that she was the 
"daughter of Ana, the son of Nahash," — a king 
(Hanum) w4th whom David had w^aged furious war. 
The reference in the epithalamium (Psalms xlv.) to 
"Tyrus's daughter," in connexion with i Kings v. 12, 
*'there was peace between Hiram and Solomon," sug- 
gests that there also marriage was the peacemaker. 

The phrase in i Kings iii. i, "Solomon made affinity 
with Pharaoh and took Pharaoh's daughter" suggests, 
though less ckarly, that some feud m^ay have been 



THE WIVES OF SOLOMON, 29 

settled in that case also. That Solomon should have 
espoused as his first and pre-eminent queen the daugh- 
ter of a Pharaoh is very picturesque if set beside the 
legend of the ''Land of Bondage," but the narrative 
could hardly have been given without any allusion to 
bygones had the story in Exodus been known. Yet the 
words "made affinity" may refer to a racial feud in that 
direction. This princess brought as her dowry the 
important frontier city of Gezer, and her palace appears 
to have been the first fine edifice erected in Jerusalem. 
The commercial regime established by Solomon 
could hardly have been possible but for his inter- 
marriages. Perhaps if the Christian ban had not been 
fixed against polygamy, and European princes had been 
permitted to marry in several countries, there might 
have been fewer wars, as well as fewer illicit con- 
nexions. The intermarriages of the large English 
royal family with most of the reigning houses of 
Europe, have been for many years a security of peace, 
and it is not improbable that our industrial and demo- 
cratic age, wherein the working man's welfare depends 
on peace, may find in the undemocratic institution of 
royalty a certain utility in its power to be prolific in 
such ties of peace. 



CHAPTER IV. 

SOLOMON'S IDOLATRY. 

Bathsheba's function at Solomon's marriage is cele- 
brated in the Song of Songs : 

"Go forth, O ye daughters of Zion, and behold King Solomon, 
With the crown wherewith his mother crowned him in the 
day of his espousals." 

Bathsheba, as we have seen, was said to have written 
Proverbs xxxi. as an admonition or reproof to her son 
on his betrothal wath the daughter of Pharaoh. The 
words of David, "Send me Uriah the Hittite" (2 Sam. 
xi. 6), and the emphasis laid on Uriah's being a Hittite 
(a race v/ith which intermarriage v/as prohibited, Deut. 
vii. 1-5) might have been meant as some legal excuse 
for David's conduct. He rescued Bathsheba, Hebra- 
ised (i Chr. iii. 5), from unlawful wedlock, it might 
be said, and her exaltation in Talmudic tradition may 
have been meant to guard the purity of David's lineage. 
But the ascription to Bathsheba of especial opposition 
to her son's marriage with the daughter of Pharaoh 
indicates that the gravamen in Solomon's posthumous 
offence la}^ less in his intermarriage with foreigners 
than in building for them shrines of their several 
deities, — Istar, Chemosh, Milcom, and the rest. 
Against Pharaoh's daughter the Talmud manifests a 
special animus : she is said to have introduced to Solo- 

30 



SOLOMON'S IDOLATRT. 31. 

mon a thousand musical instruments, and taught him 
chants to the various idols. (Shahhath, 56, col. 2.) 

There is a bit of Solomonic folklore according to 
which the Devil tempted him with a taunt that he would 
be but an ordinary person but for his magic ring, in 
which lay all his wisdom. Solomon being piqued into 
a denial, was challenged to remove his ring, but no 
sooner had he done so than the Devil seized it, and, 
having by its might metamorphosed the king beyond 
recognition, himself assumed the appearance of Solo- 
mon and for some time resided in the royal seraglio. 
The miore familiar legend is that Solomon Vv^as cajoled 
into parting with his signet ring by a promise of the 
demon to reveal to him the secret of demonic superi- 
ority over man in power. Having transformed Solo- 
mon and transported him four hundred miles away, the 
demon (Asmodeus) threw the ring into the sea. Solo- 
mon, after long vagrancy, became the cook of the king 
of Ammion (Ano Hanun), with whose daughter, 
Naam^ah, he eloped. "*" One day in dressing a fish for 
dinner Naamah found in it the signet ring which 
Asmodeus had throvv-n into the sea, and Solomon thus 
recovered his palace and harem from the demon. 

The connexion of this fish-and-ring legend, — known 
in several versions, from the Ring of Polycrates (Hero- 
dotus HI.) to the heraldic legend of Glasgow, — with 
the Solomonic dem.onology, looks as if it may once have 
been part of a theory that the idolatrous shrines v/ere 
built for the princesses while the Devil was personating 
their lord. In truth, however, all of these animadver- 

* "Ammou" probab]^' developed the name "Amuia," given in the Tal- 
mud as the name of a favorite concubine of Solomon, to whom, Vvhi'e he was 
bathing, he entrusted h,is signet ring, and from whom the Devil, Sakhar, 
obtained it by appearing to her in the shape of Solomon. This is the version 
referred to in the Koran, chapter x:v^:viii. (Sale.) 



32 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

sions belong to a comparatively late period. Many 
struggles had to precede even the recognition of the 
idolatrous character of the shrines, and to the last the 
Jews were generally proud of the "graven images" in 
their temple, — including brazen reproductions of the 
terrible Golden Calf. At the same time there were no 
doubt some old priests and soothsayers to whom these 
new-fangled things were injurious and odious, and 
superstitious people enough to cling to their ancient 
unhewn altar rather than to the brilliant cherubim, just 
as in Catholic countries the devotees cannot be drawn 
from their age-blackened Madonnas and time-stained 
crucifixes by the most attractive works of modern art. 
Although there is no evidence that the God of Israel 
was known under the name of either Jah or Jahveh in 
Solomon's time, there is little doubt that the rudi- 
mentary forces of Jahvism were felt in the Solomonic 
age. The furious prophetic denunciations of the wise 
and learned which echoed on through the centuries, 
and made the burden of St. Paul, indicate that there 
was from the first much superstition among the peasant- 
ry, which might easily in times of distress be fanned 
into fanaticism. The special denunciation of Solomon 
by Jahveh, and his suppression during the prophetic 
age, could hardly have been possible but for some 
extreme defiance on his part of the primitive priesthood 
and the soothsayers. The temple was dedicated by the 
king himself without the help of any priest, and the 
monopoly of the prophet was taken away by the estab- 
lishment of an oracle in the temple. And the worst was 
that these things indicated a genuine liberation of the 
king, intellectually, from the superstitions out of which 
Jahvism grew. This was especially proved by his dis- 



SOLOMON'S IDOLATRV. 33 

regard of the sanctuary claimed by the murderer Joab, 
who had laid hold of the horns of the altar. The altar 
was the precinct of deity, and beyond the jurisdiction of 
civil or military authority ; yet when the "man of blood" 
refused to leave the altar our royal forerunner of Eras- 
tus compelled the reluctant executioner to slay him at 
the altar, — even the sacred altar of unhewn stone. As 
no thunderbolt fell from heaven on the king for this 
sacrilege, the act could not fail to be a thunderbolt from 
earth striking the phantasmal heaven of the priest. 
The Judgment Day for settlement of such accounts was 
not yet invented, and injuries of the gods were left to 
the vengeance of their priests and prophets. 

There is an unconscious humour in the solemn read- 
ing by English clergymen of Jahvist rebukes of Solo- 
mon for his tolerance towards idolatry, at a time when 
the Queen of England and Empress of India is protect- 
ing temples and idols throughout her realm, and has just 
rebuilt the ancient temple of Buddha at Gaya ; while the 
sacred laws of Brahman, Buddhist, Parsee, Moslem, 
are used in English courts of justice. If any modern 
Josiah should insult a shrine of Vishnu, or of any 
Hindu deity, he would have to study his exemplar 
inside a British prison. 



CHAPTER V. 

SOLOMON AND THE SATANS. 

When Solomon ascended the throne, Jerusalem must 
have been a wretched place, without any art or archi- 
tecture, with a swarming mongrel population, mainly 
of paupers. The holy ark was kept in a tent, and the 
altar of unhewn stone accurately symbolised the rude 
condition of the people, among whom Solomon could 
find no workmen of skill enough to build a temple. It 
is not easy to forgive him for compelling a good many 
of them into the public works ; but it was probably no 
more than a national conscription of the unemployed 
paupers in Jerusalem, chiefly on fortifications for their 
own defence. There w^as apparently no slave-mart, 
and it seems rather better to conscript people for public 
industries than, in our modern way, for cutting their 
neighbors' throats. Most of them were the remnants 
of tribes that once occupied the region, much despised 
by the Israelites, and probably they looked on Solo- 
mon's plan of building Jerusalem into a city of mag- 
nificence, giving everybody employment and support, as 
a grand socialistic movement. An Ephraimite, Jero- 
boam, who tried to get up a revolt in Jerusalem does 
not seem to have found any adherents. The only peo- 
ple who complained of any yoke — and their complaint 
is only heard of after some centuries — were the priest- 
ridden and prophet-ridden Israelites who had become 

34 



SOLOMON AND THE SATAN S. 35 

fanatically excited about the strange shrines built for 
the king's foreign wives, and the splendid carvings and 
forms in the temple itself. Probably the first two 
commandmerits in the decalogue w^ere put there with 
special reference to some Solomonic cult with an aes- 
thetic taste for graven images and foreign shrines. 

There can be little doubt that Solomon, by his patron- 
age of these foreign religions, detached them from the 
cruel rites traditionally associated with them. Among 
all the censures pronounced against him none attributes 
to him any human sacrifices, though' such are ascribed 
to David and Samuel, (i Sam. xv. 33, 2 Sam. xxi. 
9.) The earliest rebukes of sacrifice in the Bible are 
those attributed to Solomon. "To do justice and judg- 
ment is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice" 
(Prov. xxi. 3). "By mercy and truth iniquity is 
atoned for" (Prov. xvi. 6). "Mercy and truth pre- 
serve the king; he upholdeth his throne by mercy" 
(Prov. XX. 28). "Deliver them that are carried away 
to death : those that are ready to be slain forbear not 
thou to save" (Prov. xxiv. 11). "Love covereth all 
transgressions" (Prov. x. 12). 

Solomon may not indeed have written these and the 
many similar maxims ascribed to him, but they are 
among the most ancient sentences in the Bible, and they 
would not have been attributed to any man vv^ho had not 
left among the people a tradition of humanity and 
benevolence. Had the royal "idolator" or his wives 
stained their shrines with human blood the prophets 
would have been eager to declare it. Two acts of 
cruelty are ascribed to Solomon's youth, in the book of 
Kings : one of these, the execution of Shimei, carried 
out his father's order, but only after Shimei had been 



36 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

given fair warning with means of escape; while the 
other, the execution of Adonijah (Solomon's brother), 
if true, is too much wrapped up in obscurity to enable 
us to judge its motives; but it cannot be regarded as 
historical. 

The second historiographer of Kings, setting out to 
record Jahveh's anger about Solomon's foreign wives 
and shrines (i Kings xi) says, with unconscious 
humour, that Jahveh raised Satan against him, — two 
Satans. One of these was Hadad, an Edomite, the 
other Rezon, a Syrian. The writer says that this was 
when Solomon was old, his wives having then turned 
away his heart after other gods. Fortunately, how- 
ever, this writer has embodied in his record some items, 
evidently borrowed, which contradict his Jahvistic 
legend. One of these tells us that Hadad had been 
carried away from Edom to Egypt, when David and his 
Captain Joab massacred all the males in Edom ; that he 
there married the sister of Pharaoh; and that he re- 
turned to his own country on hearing of the death of 
David and Joab. When this occurred, Solomon, so 
far from being old, was about eighteen. The Septua- 
gint (Vatican MS.) says that Hadad "reigned in the 
land of Edom." We may conclude then that on the 
return of this heir to the throne Edom declared its 
independence, nor is there any indication that Solomon 
tried to prevent this. Another contradiction of this 
writer is a note inserted about Rezon the Syrian, — "He 
was an adversary of Israel all the days of Solomon." 
Not, therefore, a Satan raised up by Jahveh against 
Solomon when in old age he had turned to other gods. 
Rezon "reigned over Syria," and there is no indica- 
tion of any expedition against him sent out by Solomon. 



SOLOMON AND THE SATANS. 37 

Bishop Colenso {Pentateuch, Vol. III., p. loi), in re- 
ferring to these points^ remarks that we do not read of 
a single warlike expedition undertaken by Solomon.* 
The remark (i Kings xi.) about the Satans set 
against Solomon is more applicable to the Shiloh 
traitors, Ahijah and Jeroboam. Jeroboam, — a servant 
whom Solomon had raised to high office, — was insti- 
gated by Ahijah, a "prophet" neglected by Solomon, 
to his ungrateful treason. Ahijah pretended that he 
had a divine revelation that he (Jeroboam) was to suc- 
ceed Solomon on account (of course!) of the king's 
shrines to Istar, Chemosh, and ^Iilcom. If the narra- 
tive were really historic nothing could be more ''Sa- 
tanic" than the lies and treacheries related of those self- 
seekers. Were the story true, the failure of these 
divinely appointed "Satans" to overthrow the kingdom 
of Solomon, who did not arm against them, must have 
been due to his popularity. In after times this im- 
punity of the glorious "idolator" would have to be 
explained ; consequentlv we find Jahveh telling Solo- 
mon that, offended as he was by the shrines, he would 
spare him for his father's sake, but would rend the 
kingdom, save one tribe, from his (Solomon's) son. 
That this should be immediately followed by the raising 
up of "Satans" to harass Solomon and Israel, Jahveh 
having just said the trouble should be postponed till 
after the king's death, suggests that the w^hole account 
of these quarrels (i Kings xi. 14-40) is a late interpola- 

* The marriage ot Hadad with Pharaoh's sister and that of Solomon 
shortly after with Pharaoh's daughter might naturally, Colenso says, lead to 
some amicable arrangement between these two young princes, representing 
respectively the ancient domains of Jacob and Esau, and the Bishop adds the 
pregnant suggestion: " Thus also would be explained another phenomenon 
in connexion with this matter, which we observe in the Jehovistic portions of 
Genesis — viz., iYiO. reconciliation of Esau and Jacob" (Gen. xxxiii). That 
Solomon was on good terms with Edom appears by the fact that his naval 
station was in that land ( i K. ix. 26). 



38 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

tion. Up to that point the old record is unbroken. 
"He had peace on all sides round about him; And 
Judah and Israel dwelt safely, every man under his 
vine and under his fig-tree, from Dan to Beersheba, all 
the days of Solomon" (i Kings iv. 24-25). 

Jahveh, in his personal interview with Solomon (i 
Kings xi. 11-13), said, ''I will surely rend the kingdom 
from thee and will give it to thy servant." That is, as 
explained by the ''prophet" Ahijah, to Jeroboam. As 
a retribution and check on idolatry the selection, besides 
violating Jahveh's promise to David (i Chron. xxii), 
was not successful : after the sundering of Israel and 
Judah into internecine kingdoms, Jeroboam, King of 
Israel, established idolatry more actively than either 
Solomon or his son Rehoboam. On Jeroboam, his 
selected Nemesis, Jahveh inflicted his characteristic 
punishment of visiting the sins of the fathers on the 
children ; as David was left the seduced wife whose 
husband he had murdered, while his son was executed ; 
as Solomon was left in peaceful enjoyment of his king- 
dom and none of the sinful shrines destroyed, while his 
son bore the penalty ; so now Jeroboam, elect of Jahveh, 
built golden calves, surpassed Solomon's offences, and 
vengeance was taken on his son Abijah, who died. 
This Abijah left a son, Baasha, who, undeterred by 
these fatalities, continued the "idolatries" with impun- 
ity for the twenty-four years of his reign, the punish- 
ment falling on his son Elah, who was slain after only 
two years' reign by his military servant, Zimri. And 
this Zimri, who thus carried on Jahveh's decree against 
idolatry, himself continued "in the ways of Jeroboam," 
the shrines and idols themselves being meanwhile un- 



SOLOMON AND THE SATANS. 39 

visited by any executioner or iconoclast until some 
centuries later. 

In Josiah there arrived a king, of the line of David, 
who might seem by his fury against idolatry to be 
another ''man after God's own heart." He pulverised 
the images and the shrines, he ''sacrificed the priests 
on their own altars," he even dug up the bones of those 
who had ministered at such altars and burnt them. He 
trusted Jahveh absolutely. He went to the prophetess, 
Hulda, who told him that he should be "gathered to his 
grave in peace." He was slain miserably, by the King 
of Egypt, to whom the country then became subject. 

Josephus ascribed the act of Josiah, in hurling him- 
self against an army that was not attacking him, to fate. 
The fate was that Josiah, having exterminated the 
wizards and fortune-tellers, repaired to the only dan- 
gerous one among them, because she pretended to be a 
"prophetess," inspired by Jahveh. Her assurances led 
him to believe himself invulnerable, personally, and that 
in his life-time Jerusalem would not suffer the woes she 
predicted. Josiah, "of the house of David," seems to 
have thought that his zeal in destroying the shrines 
which his ancestor Solomon had introduced, mainly 
Egyptian, would be so grandly consummated if he could 
destroy a Pharaoh, that he insisted on a combat. 
Pharaoh-Necho sent an embassy to say that he was not 
his enemy, but on his way to fight the Assyrian : "God 
commanded me to hasten ; forbear thou from opposing 
God, who is with me, that he destroy thee not." Here, 
however, was the fanatic's opportunity for an Arma- 
geddon : Pharaoh had appealed to what Solomon would 
have regarded as their common deity, but which to 



40 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

Josiah meant a chance to pit Jahveh against the God of 
Egypt. On Jahveh 's invisible forces he must have 
depended for victory. So perished Josiah, and with 
him the independence of his country. 

Solomon, the Prince of Peace, had made the house of 
Pharaoh the ally of his country. Josiah carries his 
people back under Egyptian bondage. Solomon had 
built the metropolitan Temple, whose shrines, symbols, 
works of art, represented a catholicity to all races and 
religions, — peace on earth, good will to man. Josiah, 
panic-stricken about a holy book purporting to have 
been found in the Temple, concerning which the king 
by his counsellors consulted a female fortune-teller, 
makes a holocaust of all that Solomon had built up. 



CHAPTER VI. 

SOLOMON IN THE HEXATEUCH. 

"And when they brought out the money that was 
brought into the house of Jahveh, Hilkiah the priest 
found the book of the law of Jahveh given by Moses. 
And Hilkiah answered and said to Shaphan the scribe, 
I have found the book of the law in the house of Jah- 
veh." (2 Chron. xxxiv. 14, 15.) The Chronicler adds 
to the earlier account (2 Kings xxii. 8) the words 
"given by Moses," which looks as if the authenticity of 
the book (Deuteronomy) had not been without ques- 
tion. The finding of the Book is set forth in a sort of 
picture, wherein are grouped the priest, the theologian, 
the phantom prophet, the deity, the temple, and the 
contribution-box. Every part of the ecclesiastical ma- 
chine is present. 

One is irresistibly reminded of the finding of the 
Book of Mormon by Joseph Smith, although it would 
be unfair to ascribe Deuteronomist atrocities to the 
revelations of the American phantom, Mormon. Nor 
is this a mere coincidence. There are lists of the early 
Mormons which show a large proportion of them to 
have borne Old Testament names, derived from Puritan 
ancestors. When Solomon set up his philosophic 
throne at Harvard University, and the parishes of the 
Pilgrims became Unitarian, and Boston became artis- 
tic, literary, and worldly, the Jahvists began to migrate, 

41 



42 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE, 

carrying with them their Sabbatarian Ark, in which so 
many frontier communities are imprisoned "unto this 
day." Some of them have become conquerors of Ha- 
waiian ''Canaanites/' appropriating their lands. But 
the Vermont Hilkiah, Joseph Smith, discerned that a 
new Deuteronomy was needed to deal with the many 
American sects, and was guided by an Angel of the 
Lord to a spot in Ontario County, New York, where the 
Book was found ( 1827), which he was enabled to trans- 
late by the aid of his "Urim and Thummim" spectacles, 
found beside the Book. In the Book were discussed 
the principles of all the sects, though not by name, as 
in Deuteronomy Moses is made to deal with the condi- 
tions which had arisen since the time of Solomon. Un- 
fortunately for these American Jahvists, they had left 
the New English brains behind, with Channing and 
Emerson, and had not carried with them enough to 
produce a western Jeremiah to save their movement 
from ridicule and popular hatred. 

"Thy words were found and I did eat them," says 
Jeremiah (xv. 16). Whether, as some scholars think, 
Jeremiah had any part in the composition of the Book 
"found," or not, his rage attests the existence at the 
time of an important Solomonic School. "How say 
you. We are wise, and the law of the Lord is with us ? 
Behold the lying pen of the scribes has turned it to a 
fiction." (viii. 8.) "They are grown strong in the 
land but not for the faith." (ix. ^.') "Thus saith the 
Lord, Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither 
let the mighty man glory in his might." (ix. 23.) 

The Deuteronomist especially aims at suppression of 
the Solomonic cult and regime. The law, not found 
in Exodus, against marriage with foreigners (Deut. 



SOLOMON IN THE HEXATEUCH. 43 

vii. 3) is especially turned against Solomon's example 
by the addition that such a marriage will "turn away thy 
son from following me, that they may serve other 
gods." The wife, or other member of a man's family, 
who entices him to serve other gods, is to be stoned to 
death, (xiii. 6-1 1.) Moses is represented as antici- 
pating the setting up of kings, and even the particular 
events of Solomon's reign. Solomon's "forty thousand 
stalls of horses" (i Kings iv. 26), his horses brought 
out of Egypt (i Kings x. 28), his wives, his silver and 
gold, are all foreseen by the ancient lawgiver, who pro- 
vides that : "He [your king] shall not multiply horses 
to himself, nor cause the people to return to Egypt to 
the end that he should multiply horses .... neither 
shall he multiply wives to himself, that his heart turn 
not away; neither shall he greatly multiply to himself 
silver and gold." (Deut. xvii. 16, 17.) 

This Deuteronomist Moses foresaw, too, that some 
check on the divine appointments to the throne would 
be needed. "Thou shalt in any wise set him king over 
thee whom thy God shall choose : one from among thy 
brethren shalt thou set over thee : thou mayest not put a 
foreigner over thee." As all of these commandments 
were received by Moses from Jahveh himself (Deut. 
vi. I, and elsewhere), it is worthy of remark that there 
should be no trace of that anger with which Jahveh 
met the proposal for a monarchy : "they have rejected 
me, that I should not be king over them." (i Sam. 
viii.) In 1776 Thomas Paine, in his Common Sense, 
used this scriptural denunciation of kings with much 
effect, and it no doubt contributed much to overthrow 
British monarchy in America. 

The special denunciations of sun-worship in Deuter- 



44 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

onomy (iv. 19, xvii. 3) suggest a probability that Solo- 
mon's allusion to the sun, when dedicating the temple, 
may have been popularly associated with the punishable 
practice alluded to in Job xxxi. 26, of kissing the hand 
to the sun and moon. The words of Solomon are can- 
celled in the Massoretic text, and do not appear in any 
English version, but they are preserved by the LXX., 
and there declared to be in the book of Jasher. 'They 
are," says Dr. Briggs, ''recognised by the best modern 
critics as belonging to the original text [of i Kings 
viii. 12, 13] which then would read : 

"The sun is known in the heavens, 

But Jahveh said that he would dwell in thick darkness. 
I have built up a house of habitation for thee, 
A place for thee to dwell in forever. 
Lo, is it not written in the book of Jasher?"* 

This suppression of the opening line of the Dedica- 
tion, at cost of a grand poetic antithesis, reveals the 
hand of mere bigoted ignorance. How many other fine 
things have been eliminated, how many reduced to com- 
monplaces, we know not, but the additions and inter- 
polations in the Old Testament have been nearly all 
traced. Many of these are novelettes more prurient 
than the tales forbidden in families when found in the 
pages of Boccaccio and Balzac, and it is a notable evi- 
dence of the mere fetish that the Bible has become to 
most sects, that a chorus of abuse instead of welcome 
still meets the scholars who prove the quasi-spurious 
character of the most odious stories in Genesis. 

* The Bible, the Church, and the Reason, p. 137, ;/. Dr. Briggs points 
out citations from the book of Jasher in Num. xxi., Jos. x., and 2 Sam. i, 
where a dirge of David is given, and adds: "The book of Jasher containing 
poems of David and Solomon could not have been written before Solomon." 
The bearing of this on the age of the Hexateuch, in its present form, is 
obvious. 



SOLOMON IN THE HEXATEUCH. 45 

Bishop Colenso seems to have found in such tales 
only the work of a Jahvist with a taste for obscene de- 
tails, but too little attention has been paid to the investi- 
gations of Bernstein, who discovers in many of these 
legends a late Ephraimic effort to blacken the charac- 
ter of the whole house and line of Judah.* Bernstein 
does not deal with the story of Adonijah and Jedidiah 
(Solomon), whose relative antiquity is shown, I think, 
in the fact that no shameful action is ascribed to the 
elder brother to account for the deprivation of his 
primogenitive right. After Solomon's accession, how- 
ever, Adonijah proposed to marry the maiden Abishag, 
who technically belonged to his father's harem, and 
probably this tradition gave a cue to the inventor of the 
story of Absalom's having gone to his father's concu- 
bines in order to base on the act a claim to the kingdom 
while his father was yet alive. 

Absalom's shameful act'on is supposed to be a fulfil- 
ment of the sentence pronounced against David because 
of his crime against Uriah. A close examination of 
that passage (2 Sam. xii. 10-14) must suggest doubts 
about verses 11, 12, but at any rate the sentence is not 
fulfilled by Absalom's alleged act : David's ''wives" 
were not taken away "before his eyes," and given "unto 
his neighbor," but some of his concubines were appro- 
priated by his son. Absalom's act (2 Sam. xvi. 20-23) 
and that of David's consigning the concubines to per- 
petual isolation or imprisonment (2 Sam. xx. 3) are 
not alluded to in David's mourning for Absalom, nor in 
Joab's rebuke of this grief. In these strange incoherent 
items one seems to find the debris, so to say, of some 

. * Ursprung der Sagen von Abraham, Isaak, und Jakob. Kritische 
Untersuchung von A. Bernstein. Berlin. 1871. 



46 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

masterly work, picturing a sort of Nemesis pursuing 
David and his family for the crime against Uriah. 
Ahithophel, who is described as ''the word of God," 
was the grandfather of Bathsheba and the chief friend 
and counsellor of David, yet it was he who suddenly 
becomes a traitor to the King, foreshadowing Judas — 
as his sinister name ("brother of lies") implies — even to 
the extent of hanging himself. It was Bathsheba's 
grandfather who moved Absalom to dishonor his 
father's concubines. But were they only concubines in 
the original story, or were they David's wives, as pre- 
dicted in the verses ii, 12 (2 Sam. xii.) which seem 
misplaced and unfulfilled ? It may have been that some 
of the details of the story were too gross for preserva- 
tion, or too disgraceful to David, but I cannot think 
that we possess in its original form the tragedy sug- 
gested by the presence of an ancestor of seduced Bath- 
sheba, — the sinister "word of God" Ahithophel, — and 
the death of the child of that adultery, the deflowering 
of Tamar, David's daughter, the disgrace and violent 
death of Amnon, Absalom, apparently of Daniel also, 
and finally of Adonijah. What became of the eight 
wives of David? Was that prediction ascribed to 
Nathafi, of their defilement, without any corresponding 
narrative ? 

In a previous chapter I have pointed out the improb- 
ability that the fatal wrath of Solomon against Adoni- 
jah could have been excited by his brother's proposal of 
honorable wedlock with the maiden Abishag, and con- 
jectured that there may have been a story, now lost, of 
rivalry between the brothers for this "very fair" dam- 
sel. Whatever may have been the real history there is 
little doubt that there was substituted for it some real 



SOLOMON IN THE HEXATEUCH. 47 

offence by Adonijah, perhaps such as that afterwards 
ascribed to Absalom. Bathsheba herself is here the 
Nemesis, as her grandfather is in the case of Absalom. 

It must be borne in mind that we are dealing with the 
age which produced the thrilling story of Joseph and 
his brothers, and Potiphar's wife, and the contrast with 
his chastity represented in the profligacy of Judah. 
Indications have been left in Gen. xxxv. at the end of 
verse 22 of the suppression of a story of Reuben and 
Bilhah, and no doubt there were other suppressions. 
How very bad the story of Reuben was we may judge, 
as Bernstein points out, by the severity of his con- 
demnation by Jacob (Gen. xlix.) and by the shocking 
things about Judah (Gen. xxxviii.) allowed to remain 
in the text. In the latter chapter Bernstein finds the 
same personages, — David, Bathsheba, Solomon, — act- 
ing in a similar drama to that presented in the Samuel 
fragments, and under their diguises may perhaps be 
discovered some of the details suppressed in the Davidic 
records. Bernstein savs : 

"In Genesis xxxviii. Judah, the fourth son of the 
patriarch, is shown in a light which is to lay bare the 
stain of his existence. Judah went to Adullam, where 
lived his friend 'Chirah.' He married a Canaanite, the 
daughter of Shuah.* His eldest son was called Er. 
He (Er) was displeasing in the eyes of Jahveh, there- 
fore Jahveh slew him. His second son was called 
Onan : he died in consequence of his sexual sins. The 
third son's name was Shelah, and, as it is mysteriously 
stated after his name, 'he was at Chezib when his mother 
bare him.' Chezib is certainly the name of a place, and 
the addition may therefore signify that the mother had 

*The marriage is doubtful: "He took her and went into her" (Gen. 
xxxviii. 2.) 



4S SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

named the boy Shelah because the father happened to 
be in Chezib at the time, absent from home. Chezib 
has, however, a second meaning. . . . Chezib means 
'deception. He,' and is used by the prophet Micah in this 
sense (i. 4). Now as Shelah, in our narrative, serves 
to deceive Tamar's hopes, held out by Judah, the allu- 
sion to Chezib is appropriate. However this may be, 
Judah's sons are all represented as despicable. Even 
Judah himself fell into bad ways and was trapped into 
the snares laid by his daughter-in-law Tamar, who 
played the prostitute. Thus only did Judah found a 
generation, from which King David is said to descend, 
from a son of Judah called Paretz, meaning 'breaking 
through,' in which manner he is supposed to have be- 
haved towards his brother at his birth. 

"Veiled as the libel is here, it becomes apparent as 
soon as we cast a glance upon David's family. The pic- 
ture which this libel draws of Judah hits David himself 
sharply. The 'Canaanite'— namely, whom Judah mar- 
ries [ ?] — is no other than the wife of Uriah the Hittite 
(murdered at David's command) whom David himself 
married adulterously. This wife of Judah is said to 
have been the daughter of a man named Shuah. There- 
fore she is a Bath-shua, and is thus called (verse 12). 
But Bathshua is also' Bathsheba herself, as one may 
conclude from i Chron. iii. 5. The eldest son died, 
hateful in the sight of God, just like the first son of 
Bathsheba (2 Sam. xii. 15). The son of Judah is 
alleged to have been called Er ("^5^) ; why? because 
reading it backwards {^\ wrong) it means 'bad/ 
'wicked.' The second son is called Onan ("51^), and 
dies for sexual sins. He is no other than David's son 
Amnon('|ij'^^), who meets his death on account of his 



SOLOMON IN THE HEXATEUCH. 49 

sexual sins (2 Sam. xiii). The Tamar of Judali's story 
is the same as the Tamar dishonored by Amnon, — the 
daughter of David, who, in spite of her misfortune and 
her purity, is, to the entire ruin of her good name, 
humiliated to a person who plays the prostitute. And 
Shelah (nbnj) who does not die, — add to his name only 
the letter /J, and you have H/OblT, Solomon." 

If in the light of these facts, which reveal the mythi- 
cal character of some of the worst things told of Judah 
and David, the blessings of Jacob (Gen. xlix.) be care- 
fully read, the blessing on Judah will be found rather 
equivocal. Colenso translates : 

"A lion's whelp is Judah, 
Ravaging the young of the suckling ewes." 

Is this couplet related to Nathan's parable of the rich 
man taking away the poor man's one little ewe lamb 
which smote the conscience of David ? 

"The staff shall not depart from Judah, 
Nor the rod from between his feet 
Until Shiloh come." 

Is this merely a device of the Ephraimite rebels, Jero- 
boamites, pretending to find in a patriarchal prophecy 
a prediction that Judah is to be superseded by the 
descendants of Joseph (on whom Jacob's encomiums 
and blessings are unstinted) ? Shiloh was always their 
headquarters. 

It is probable, however, that there is here a play upon 
words. The words ''Until Shiloh come" are rendered 
by some scholars ''Till he (Judah) come to Shiloh," 
and interpreted as meaning "Till he come to rest." 
The Samaritan version {^' donee veniat Pac'iileiLs") 
seems to identify Shiloh with Solomon. (Colenso, 



50 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

Pent, iii. p. 127.) But this is transparently Shelah over 
again. Shelomoh (Solomon), Shelah, and Shiloh are 
substantially of the same etymological significance. It 
will be observed that in Gen. xxxviii. Shelah is the only 
person whose character is not blackened. The Ephra- 
imic poem, the "Blessings of Jacob," — each blessing a 
vaticinium ex evento, — could well afford a half-dis- 
guised compliment to Solomon who had made no 
attempt to suppress the rebels of Shiloh, — ^the city of 
Abijah, who originated the Jeroboamic revolution which 
divided the Davidic kingdom. Jacob's blessing on 
Joseph is of course a blessing on Ephraim: it closes 
with a transfer of the crown (from Judah) to "him 
that is a prince among his brethren." This is "rest" 
from the arrows of David, this is the coming of Shiloh ; 
it occurred under the reign of the Prince of Peace, 
Solomon, and it could not be undone by Solomon's son 
Rehoboam. 



CHAPTER VII. 

SOLOMONIC ANTIJAHVISM. 

The ferocities of Josiah and his Jahvists indicate the 
presence of an important Solomonist School. Their 
culture and tendencies are reflected, as we have seen, 
in the rage of prophets against them, and the continu- 
ance of their strength is shown in the preservation of 
Agur's Voltairian satire on Jahvism, and Job's avowed 
blasphemies : 

"If indeed ye will glorify yourselves above me, 
And prove me guilty of blasphemy — 
Know then, that God hath wronged me!" 

This translation from Job, quoted from Professor 
Dillon, need only be compared with that of the author- 
ised and the revised versions to show us the causa cati- 
sans to-day which of old added four hundred interpola- 
tions to the Book of Job to soften its criticism. 

It appears strange, however, that Professor Dillon 
has not included among The Sceptics of the Old Testa- 
ment three writers in the composite eighty-ninth 
Psalm, nor remarked its relation to the Book of Job. 
At the head of this wonderful composition the myth- 
ical wise man of i Kings iv. 31, Ethan, rises ("Maschil 
of Ethan the Ezrahite," perhaps meaning Wisdom of 
the Everlasting Helper) to attest the divine mercies and 
faithfulness in all generations. This is in two verses, 
evidently ancient, which a later hand, apparently, has 

51 



5^ SOLOMOXIC LITERATURE. 

pointed with a specification of the covenant with David. 
After the "Selah" which ends these four verses come 
fourteen verses of sermonising upon them, in which 
nearly all of the points made by Job's "comforters" are 
put in a nutshell. The sons of God who presented them- 
selves, Satan among them, in his council (Job i. 6) 
appear here also (Ps. Ixxxix. 6) : 

"Who among the sons of the gods is like unto Jahveh, 
A God very terrible in the council of the holy ones." • 

After the mighty things that ''J^h" had done to his 
enemies have been affirmed an Elohist takes up the bur- 
den and a ''vision" like that of EHphaz (Job iv. 13) is 
appealed to : 

"Then thou spakest in vision to thy holy ones." 

The vision's revelation (Job v. 17) ''Happy is the 
man whom God correcteth" is also in this psalm 
(32, 33) : ''Then will I visit their transgression with 
the rod, and their iniquity with stripes, but my mercy 
will I not utterly take from him." And Eliphaz's 
assurance "thy seed will be great" (v. 25) corresponds 
with that in our psalm (verse 36), "His seed shall 
endure forever." 

When the psalmist of the vision has pictured, as if 
in dissolving views, the military renown of David, God's 
"servant," and his "horn," pointing to Solomon, God's 
"first-born," the transgressions of the latter are inti- 
mated (30-33), but the seer continues to utter the divine 
promises : 

"My covenant will I not break, 
Nor alter the thing that has gone out of my lips. 
One thing have I sworn by my holiness; 
I will not lie unto David: 



SOLOMONIC ANTIJAHVISM. 53 

His seed shall endure forever, 
And his throne as the sun before me; 
As the moon which is established forever: 
Faithful is the witness in the sky. Selah," 

Then breaks out the indignant accuser : 

"But thou HAST cast off and rejected! 
Thou hast been wroth with thine 'anointed' ; 
Thou hast broken the covenant with thy 'servant,' 
Thou hast profaned his crown to the very dust ; 
Thou hast broken down all his defences ; 
Thou hast brought his strongholds to ruin ! 
All the wayfarers that pass by despoil him ; 
He is become a reproach to his neighbors. 
Thou hast exalted the right-hand of his adversaries, 
Thou hast made all his enemies to rejoice. 
Yea, thou turnest back the edge of his sword, 
And hast not enabled him to stand in battle. 
Thou hast made his brightness to cease. 
And hurled his throne down to the ground. 
The days of his youth thou hast shortened : 
Thou hast covered him with shame ! Selah." 

A sarcastic "Selah," or "so it is!" — if Eben Ezra's 
definition of Selah be correct. 

Then follow four verses by a more timid plaintiff, 
who, almost in the words of Job (e. g., x. 20), reminds 
Jahveh of the shortness of life, and the impossibility of 
any return from the grave, and asks how long he intends 
to wait before fulfilling his promises. He also sup- 
plies Koheleth with a text by the pessimistic exclama- 
tion, "For what vanity hast thou created all the children 
of men" ! 

After this writer has sounded his "Selah," another 
rather more bitterly reminds Jahveh, in three verses, 
that not only his chosen people are in disgrace, but his 
own enemies are triumphant. 

(These two are much like the writer of Psalms xliv. 



54 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

9-26, who almost repeats the points made by the above 
three remonstrants, and asks Jahveh, ''Why sleepest 
thou?") 

Finally a Jahvist doxology, fainter than any ap- 
pended to the other four books, completes this strange 
eighty-ninth psalm : 

"Praised be Jahveh for evermore! 
Amen, and Amen!" 

Great is Diana of the Ephesians ! Or is this the 
half-sardonic submission of Job under the whirlwind- 
answer, which extorted from him no tribute except a 
virtual admission that when the ethical debate became 
a question of which could wield the loudest whirlwinds, 
he surrendered ! 

In Job's case the only recantation is that of Jahveh 
himself, who admits (xlii. 7) that Job had all along 
spoken the right thing about him (Jahveh). The 
epilogue is a complete denial of Jahvist theology. 

Job's small voice of scepticism which followed the 
whirlwind was never silenced. The fragment of Agur 
(Proverbs xxx. 1-4) appears to have been written as 
the alternative reply of Job to Jahveh. Job had said, 
'T am vile, I will lay my hand upon my mouth, I have 
uttered that I understand not." Agur adds ironically, 
'T am more stupid than other men, in me is no human 
understanding nor yet the wisdom to comprehend the 
science of sacred things." Then quoting Jahveh's 
boast about distributing the wind (Job xxxviii. 24), 
about his "sons shouting for joy" {Ihid. 7), and giving 
the sea its garment of cloud {Ihid. 9), Agur, the 
"Hebrew Voltaire," as Professor Dillon aptly styles 
him, asks : 



SOLOMONIC ANTIJAHVISM. 55 

"Who has ascended into heaven and come down again? 
Who can gather the wind in his fists? 
Who can bind the seas in a garment? 
Who can grasp all the ends of the earth? 
Such an one I would question about God : 'What is his name? 
And what the name of his sons, if thou knowest?' " 

The stupid Jahvist commentator who follows Agur 
(Proverbs xxx. 5-14) and in the same chapter interpo- 
lates 17 and 20, has the indirect value of rendering it 
probable that there were a great many "Agurites" (a 
*'bad generation" he calls them) and that they were 
raither aristocratic and distrustful of the masses. This 
commentator, who cannot understand the Agur frag- 
ments, also shows us, side by side with the brilliant 
genius, lines revealing the mentally pauperised condi- 
tion into which Jahvism must have fallen when such a 
writer was its champion. 

It is tolerably certain that such fragments as those 
of Agur imply a literary atmosphere, a cultured phil- 
osophic constituency, and a long precedent evolution of 
rationalism. Such peaks are not solitary, but rise from 
mountain ranges. Professor Dillon, whose admir- 
able volume merits study, finds Buddhistic influence in 
Agur's fragments.* But I cannot find in them any 
trace of the recluse or of the mystic ; he does not appear 
to be even an "agnostic," for when he says *T have wor- 
ried myself about God and succeeded not," the vein is 
too satirical for a mind interested in theistic specula- 
tions. He is a man of the world, — more of a Goethe 
than a Voltaire ; he regards Jahveh as a phantasm, is 
well domesticated in his planet, and does not moralise 
on the facts of nature in the Oriental any more than in 

* The Sceptics of the Old Testament, pp. 149, 155. 



56 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

the Pharisaic way. He appears to be a true Solomonic 
philosopher and naturalist. I cannot agree to Professor 
Dillon's omission of the "Four Cunning Ones" (Prov- 
erbs XXX. 24-28), because they are not of the same 
metrical form as the others, and lead "nowhither." The 

lines 

"The ants are a people not strong, 
Yet they provide their meat in the summer," 

no doubt led to the famous parable of Proverbs vi. 
6-1 1, "Go to the ant, thou sluggard." Being there 
imbedded in an otherwise commonplace editorial chap- 
ter, they may have been derived from some commen- 
tator on Agur. 

Agur apparently represents the Solomonic thinkers 
brought with the rest of the people under the trials that 
made Israel the Job of nations. They are such as those 
who led astonished Jeremiah to ask "what kind of wis- 
dom is in them?" (Jeremiah viii.) They "do not 
recognise Jahveh's judgments"; in "shame, dismay, 
captivity, they have rejected Jahveh's word." The 
exquisite humor of Agur shows that these philosophers 
did not lose their serenity. Agur sees man passing his 
life between two insatiable daughters of the ghoul, "the 
Grave and the Womb," — Birth and Death, — and amid 
the inevitable evils of life he will be wise to refrain from 
rage and lay his hand upon his lips. 

But silence was just what the Jahvist omniscients 
could not attain to. Notwithstanding Jahveh's confes- 
sion that Job was right in his position, and the orthodox 
wrong in their theory that all evil is providential, the 
"comforters" rise again in the commentator who begins 
(Proverbs xxx. 5) : 

"Every word of God is perfected. 
He is a shield to them that trust in Him," 



SOLOMONIC ANTIJAHVISM. 57 

and proceeds in verse 14 with his inanities. And these 
have prevailed ever since. Even Jesus, when he took 
up the burden of Wisdom, and rebuked the Jahvist 
superstition that those on whom a tower fell were sub- 
jects of a judgment, must have his stupid corrector to 
add, ''Except ye repent ye shall all likewise perish." 
This simpleton's superstition has taken the place of the 
great successor of Solomon, and to-day, amid all the 
learning of Christendom, is proclaiming that the Father 
is "permitting" all the Satans, — war, disease, earth- 
quake, famine, — to harry his children just to test them 
or to chasten them. Why should omnipotence create 
a race requiring worse than inquisitorial tortures for 
its discipline? In all the literature of Christendom 
there is not one honest attempt to deal with the evils and 
agonies of nature ; and at this moment we find theists 
apotheosizing the "Unknowable from which all things 
proceed," without any appreciation of the fact that in 
the remote past Jahvism sought the same refuge, and 
that it was proved by Job a refuge of fallacies. In an 
awakening moral and humane sentiment Job stands in 
this latter day upon the earth, and again steadily repeats 
his demand why one should respect an Unknowable 
from whom all things, — all horrors and agonies, — 
proceed. 

Ethically we are required to do no evil that good 
may come; theologically, to worship a deity who is 
doing just that all the time. This is no doubt a con- 
venient doctrine for the Christian nations that wish to 
preserve their own property and peace at home, while 
acting as banditti in remote continents and islands. All 
such atrocities are enacted and adopted as part of the 
providential plan of spreading the Gospel, latterly 



58 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

"civilisation" ; but it is very certain that there can be 
no such thing as national civilisation until evil is recog- 
nised as evil, good as good, — the one to be abhorred, the 
other loved, — and no deity respected whose government 
would wrong a worm. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE BOOK OF PROVERBS AND THE AVESTA. 

The legend of the Queen of Sheba forms not only 
a poetic prologue to the epical tradition of Solomon's 
wisdom, but has a substantial connexion with the char- 
acter of that wisdom, to whose final personification she 
contributed. 

The corresponding Oriental stories do not necessarily 
deprive this legend of historic basis, but point to the 
region of this "Queen of the Seven (Sheba)." Those 
Oriental pilgrimages of eminent women to great sages, 
however invested with magnificence, are natural ; even 
such romances could not have been invented unless in 
accordance with the genius of the country in which they 
were written. There is no antecedent improbability 
that a queen, belonging to a region in which her sex 
enjoyed large freedom, should have made a journey to 
meet Solomon. 

The Abyssinians, who regard her as the founder of 
their dynasty, at the same time show how little char- 
acteristic of their country the legend was, by their 
ancient tradition, that it was the Queen of Sheba who 
provided that no woman should sit on the throne, for- 
ever! They claim that this Queen is referred to in 
Psalm xlv. — "At thy right hand doth stand the Queen, 
in gold of Ophir." This psalm is Solomonic, but the 
reference is no doubt to the Queen Mother, Bathsheba 

59 



6o SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

(whose throne was on his "right hand," i Kings ii. 19). 
Neither Naamah the Ammonitess, mother of Solomon's 
successor, nor the daughter of Pharaoh, who was his 
especially distinguished wife, is described as a queen, 
— this indeed not being a Jewish title for a king's wife. 
The psalm indicates much glory to be conferred on a 
woman by wedlock with Solomon, but not that he was 
to derive any honor from either or all of the ''three- 
score queens" assigned him in later times (Cant. vi. 8). 
In another Solomonic Psalm (Ixxii.) it is said: 

"The kings of Tarshish and of the isles shall bring presents: 
The kings of Sheba and Seba shall offer gifts, 
Yea, all kings shall fall down before him." 

No glory is here supposed to be derivable from a 
womian, and an inventor would probably have merely 
devised a saga on the last of the lines just quoted, which 
is adapted in i Kings iv. 34, to Solomon's wisdom, or 
he would have imagined some instance of a particularly 
illustrious monarch coming to pay homage to Solomon. 
That the only example particularized is that of a woman 
carries some signs of reality. 

Assuming that there was ever any King Solomon at 
all, this Psalm Ixxii., whose Hebrew title is "Of Solo- 
mon," might have been written in the height of his 
reign. The title of "God" given him in Psalm xlv. is 
here approximated in the opening line, "Give the King 
thy judgments, O Elohim," and in the ascription to 
him of such virtues and such beneficent dominion, 
"from the river (Euphrates) to the ends of the earth," 
without any further reference to God, that an indignant 
Jahvist expands the doxology (18, 19) to include a 
reclamation for Jahveh. The ancient lyric closes with 
verse 17, which says of Solomon: 



THE BOOK OF PROVERBS. 6l 

"His name shall endure forever; 
His name shall have emanations as long as the sun; 
Men shall bless themselves in him; 
All nations shall call him The Happy." 

The Jahvist answers : 

"Blessed be Jahveh Elohim, the Elohim of Israel, 
Who alone doeth wondrous things, 
And blessed be His glorious name forever; 
And let the whole earth be filled with His glory. 
Amen, and Amen." 

Now in this beautiful poem (omitting the doxology) 
the elation is especially concerning some connexion with 
Sheba. In verse lo it is said "The kings of Sheba 
and Seba shall offer gifts"; in verse 15, "To him shall 
be given of the gold of Sheba." These lines might 
have been written on the announcement of a royal visit, 
or meeting, which had not mentioned a queen. But 
what country is indicated by Sheba (the Seven) ? In 
India there are seven holy rivers, and seven holy Rishis, 
represented by the seven stars of the Great Bear. But 
these correspond with the Seven Rivers of Persia 
which enter into the Persian Gulf, in the Avesta called 
Satavaesa, a star-deity. In the Yir Yast 9 it is said : 

"Satavsesa makes those waters flow down to the seven 
Karshvares of the earth, and when he has arrived down 
there he stands, beautiful, spreading ease and joy on the fer- 
tile countries, thinking in himself, 'How shall the countries 
of the Aryas grow fertile?' " 

As there are seven heavens, there are seven earths 
(Karshvares), and these, as already shown {ante II.), 
are presided over by the "seven infinite ones" ( Amesha- 
Spentas). Of these seven the first is Ahura Mazda 
himself, and of the others only one is female — Armaiti, 
genius of the earth. Of this wonderful and beautiful 



63 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

personification more must be said presently, but it may 
be said here that Armaiti was the spouse of Ahura 
Mazda, and Queen of the Seven, — the seven Ameshi- 
Spentas who preside respectively over the seven karsh- 
vares of the earth. 

The function of Armaiti being to win men from 
nomadic life and warfare, to foster peace and tillage, 
she was a type of "the eternal feminine" ; and such an 
ideal could hardly have been developed except in a 
region where women were held in great honour, nor 
could it fail to produce women worthy of honor. That 
such was the fact in Zoroastrian Persia is proved by 
many passages in the Avesta, wherein we find emi- 
nent women among the first disciples of Zoroaster. 
There is a litany to the Fravashis, or ever living and 
working spirits, of twenty-seven women, whose names 
are given in Favardm Yast (i 39- 142). Among these 
was the Queen Hutaosa, converted by Zoroaster, the 
wife of King Vistaspa, the Constantine of Zoroastrian- 
ism. Hutaosa was naturally a visible and royal repre- 
sentative of Armaiti, ''Queen of the Seven," a princess 
of peace, a patroness of culture, to be imitated by other 
Persian queens. 

That the sanctity of "seven" was impressed on all 
usages of life in Persia is shown in the story of Esther. 
King Ahasuerus feasts on the seventh day, has seven 
chamberlains, and consults the seven princes of Media 
and Persia ("wise men which knew the times"). 
When Esther finds favor of the King above all other 
maidens, as successor to deposed Vashti, she is at once 
given "the seven maidens, which were meet to be given 
her, out of the King's house ; and he removed her and 
her maidens to the best place of the house of the 



THE BOOK OF PROVERBS. 63 

women." Esther was thus a Queen of the Seven, — of 
Sheba, in Hebrew, — and although this w^as some cen- 
turies after Solomon's time, there is every reason to 
suppose that the Zoroastrian social usages in Persia 
prevailed in Solomon's time. At any rate we find in 
the ancient Psalm Ixxii., labeled ''Of Solomon," Kings 
of Sheba (the Seven) mentioned along with the Eu- 
phrates, chief of the Seven Rivers (Zend Hapta- 
heando) ; and remembering also the "sevens" of Esther, 
we may safely infer that a ''Queen of Sheba" connoted a 
Persian or Median Queen. 

We may also fairly infer, from the emphasis laid on 
"sevens" in Esther, in connexion with her wit and wis- 
dom, that a Queen of the Seven had come to mean a 
wise woman, whether of Jewish or Persian origin, a 
woman instructed among the Magi, and enjoying the 
freedom allowed by them to women. There is no geo- 
graphical difficulty in supposing that a Persian queen 
like Hutaosa, a devotee of Armaiti (Queen of the 
Seven, genius of Peace and Agriculture), might not 
have heard of Salem, the City of Peace, of its king 
whose title was the Peaceful (Solomon), and visited 
that city, — ^though of course the location of the meeting 
may have been only a later tradition."^ 

The object of the Queen's visit to Solomon was "to 
test him with hard questions" as to his wisdom. It 
was not to discover or pay court to his wisdom, though 
he received from her "of the gold of Sheba" spoken 
of in the psalm. As a royal missionary of the Magi her 
ability and title to prove Solomon's knowledge, and de- 

* It may be mentioned that the Moslem name for the Queen of Sheba is 
Balkis, which points to the great Zoroastrian city of Balkh, near which are 
the Seven Rivers (Saba' Sin), whose confluence makes the Balkh (Oxus), 
with whose sands gold is mingled. (Cf. Psalm Ixxii. 15.) 



64 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE, 

cide on it, are assumed in the narrative (i Kings x.). 
Several sentences in her tribute to Solomon's "wisdom 
and goodness" recall passages in the Psalm (Ixxii.). 
There is here an intimation of some prevailing belief 
that Solomon's wisdom was harmonious with the 
Zoroastrian wisdom. Whether the visit of the Queen 
be mythical or not, and even if both she and Solomon 
are regarded as mythical, the legend would none the 
less be an expression of a popular perception of ele- 
ments not Jewish in Solomonic literature. 

Of course only Biblical mythology is here referred 
to. The Moslem mythology of Solomon and the 
Queen (Balkis) has taken from the Avesta Wise King 
Yima's potent ring, and his power over demons, and 
other fables, in most instances to be noted only as an 
unconscious recognition of a certain general accent 
common to the narratives of the two great kings. Yet 
it can hardly be said that the stories of Yima in the 
Avesta and of Solomon in the Bible are entirely inde- 
pendent of each other, — as in Yima's being given by 
the deity a sort of choice and selecting the political 
career, Ahura Mazda saying: "Since thou wanted not 
to be the preacher and the bearer of my law, then make 
thou my worlds thrive, make my worlds increase: 
undertake thou to nourish, to rule, and to watch over 
my world." Ahura Mazda requests Yima to build an 
enclosure for the preservation of the seed's of life 
(men, animals, and plants) during a succession of fatal 
winters, and some of the particulars resemble both the 
legend of the ark and that of building the temple. 
Yima was, like Solomon, a priest-king (he is also called 
"the good shepherd") ; he was, like Solomon, beset 
by satans (daevas), and after a reign of fabulous pros- 



THE BOOK OF PROVERBS. 65 

perity he finally fell by uttering falsehood. What the 
falsehood was is told in the Bundahis : the good part of 
creation was ascribed to the evil creator. 

Several other heroes of the Avesta have assisted in 
the idealisation of Solomon, notably King Vistaspa, 
already mentioned. Like Solomon, he is famous for 
his horses and his wealth. Zoroaster exhorts him, 
"All night long address the heavenly Wisdom; all 
night long call for the Wisdom that will keep thee 
awake." From Zoroaster the "Young King" learned 
"how the worlds were arranged"; and he is advised 
"have no bad priests or unfriendly priests." 

It is now necessary to inquire whether there is any- 
thing corresponding to these facts in the ancient writ- 
ings ascribed to Solomon. The lower criticism has lit- 
tle liking for Solomon, and makes but a feeble struggle 
for the genuineness of his canonical books against the 
higher criticism, which forbids us to assign any word 
to Solomon. But these higher critics acquired their 
learning while lower critics, and it is difficult to repress 
an occasional suspicion of the survival of an uncon- 
scious prejudice against the royal secularist, apparent in 
their unwillingness to admit any participation at all 
of Solcfmon in the wisdom books. Is this quite reason- 
able? 

It is of course clear that Solomon cannot be described 
as thie author of any book or compilation that we now 
possess. But neither did Boccacio write Shakespeare's 
"Cymbeline," nor Dryden's "Cymon and Iphigenia," 
nor the apologue of the Ring in Lessing's "Nathan the 
Wise," nor Tennyson's "Falcon," all of which, how- 
ever, are his tales. I select Boccacio for the illustra- 
tion because his -defiance of "the moralities" led to his 



66 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

suppression in most European homes, thus faciUtating 
the utiHzation of his ideals by others who derive credit 
from his genius, this being precisely what might be 
expected in the case of the great secularist of Jerusalem. 
For no one can carefully study the Book of Proverbs 
without perceiving that a large number of them never 
could have been popular proverbs, but are terse little 
essays and fables, some of them highly artistic, which 
indicate the presence at some remote epoch of a man 
of genius. And I cannot conceive any fair reason for 
setting aside the tradition of many centuries which 
steadily united the name of Solomon with much of this 
kind of writing, or for believing that every sentence he 
ever uttered or wrote is lost. 

It would require a separate work to pick out from 
the two Anthologies ascribed to Solomon (the First, 
Proverbs x. i-xxii. i6; the Second, xxv-xxix), the 
more ekborate thoughts, and piece together those that 
represent one mind, even were I competent for that 
work. But this fine task awaits some scholar, and, in- 
deed, the whole Book of Proverbs needs a more thor- 
ough treatment in this direction than it has received. 

Of the last seven chapters of the Book of Proverbs, 
one (xxx.), containing the fragments of Agur and his 
angry antagonist, has been (vii.) considered. Chapters 
XXV., xxvi., xxvii., and xxxi. 10-31, may with. but 
little elimination fairly come under their general head- 
ing, "These are also proverbs of Solomon which the 
men of Hezekiah, King of Judah, copied out." Chap- 
ters xxviii. and xxix., with their flings at princes and 
wealth, contain many Jahvist insertions. The admir- 
able verses in xxiv. 23-34, and those in xxxi. 10-29, 31, 



THE BOOK OF PROVERBS. 67 

represent the high secular ethics of the Solomonic 
school. 

The verses last mentioned (exaltation of the virtuous 
woman) are, curiously enough, blended with ''The 
words of King Lemuel, the oracle which his mother 
taught him." The ancient Rabbins identify Lemuel 
with Solomon, and relate that when, on the day of the 
dedication of the temple, he married Pharaoh's daugh- 
ter, he drank too much at the wedding feast, and slept 
until the fourth hour of the next day, with the keys 
of the temple under his pillow. Whereupon his mother, 
Bathsheba, entered and reproved him with this oracle. 
Bathsheba's own amour with Solomon's father does 
not appear to have excited any rabbinical suspicion 
that the description of the virtuous wife with which 
the Book of Proverbs closes is hardly characteristic 
of the woman. She was the "Queen Mother," a part 
of the divine scheme, her conception of the builder of 
the temple immaculate, predetermined in the counsels 
of Jahveh. 

The first nine verses of this last chapter in the Book 
of Proverbs certainly appear as if wTitten at a later 
day, perhaps even so late as the third century before 
our era, and aimed at the Jahvist tradition of Solomon. 
Lemuel seems to be allegorical, and we here have an 
early instance of the mysterious disinclination to men- 
tion the great King's name. His name, Renan assures 
us, is hidden under "Koheleth," but he is not named 
in the text of that book or even in that of the "Wisdom 
of Solomon." In Ezra v. 1 1 the mention of the temple 
as the house "which a great king of Israel builded and 
finished" seems to indicate a purposed suppression of 



68 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

Solomon's name, which continued (Jeremiah Hi. 20 is 
barely an exception) until this silence was broken by 
Jesus Ben Sira, and again by Jesus of Nazareth. 

The removal of verse 30 (Proverbs xxxi.), clearly 
a late Jahvist protest, leaves the praise of the virtuous 
woman with which the book closes without any sugges- 
tion of piety. Yet we find here that "her price is far 
above rubies," "she openeth her mouth with wisdom," 
and one or two other tropes which probably united 
with some in the First Anthology to evolve more dis- 
tinctly the goddess Wisdom. Some sentences of the 
First Anthology grew like mustard seed. "Wisdom 
resteth in the heart of him who hath understanding" 
(Proverbs xiv. 33), reapj>ears in i Kings iii. 12, and 
in X. 24 it is definitely stated that it was the wisdom 
which God had put into Solomon's heart that made 
all the earth seek his presence. It was a miracle they 
went to see ; the glory is not that of Solomon, but that 
of God.* 

The nearest approach to a personification of Wisdom 
in the First Anthology is Proverb xx. 15: "There is 
gold and abundance of pearls, but the lips of knowledge 
are a (more) precious jewel." This expands in Job 
to a long list of precious things — gold, coral, topaz, 
pearls — ^all surpassed by Wisdom, and the similitudes 
journey on to the parables of Jesus, wherein the woman 
sweeps for the lost silver, and the man sells all he has 
for the pearl of price. This, however, was a compara- 

* In many places in the Avesta (e. g., Sirozah i. 2) a distinction is drawn 
between " the heavenly wisdom made by Mazda, and the acquired wisdom 
through the ear made by Mazda." Darmesteter says •. " Asnya khratu, the 
inborn intellect, intuition, contrasted with gaosho-sruta khratu, the knowl- 
edge acquired by hearing and learning. There is between the two nearly the 
same relation as between the paravidya and aparavidya in Brahmanism, the 
former reaching Brahma in se (parabrahma), the latter sabdabrahma, the 
word-brflhma (Brahma as taught and revealed)." {Sacred Books of the East, 
Vol. XXIII., p. 4.) 



THE BOOK OF PROVERBS. 69 

tlvely simple and human development. And the first 
complete personification of Wisdom, growing out of 
**the lips of knowledge," and perhaps influenced by the 
portraiture of ''the virtuous woman," is an expression 
of philosophical and poetic religion. This personifi- 
cation is in Proverbs viii. and ix., which are evidently 
far more ancient than the seven chapters preceding 
them, and no doubt constitute the original editorial 
Prologu-e to the so-called "Proverbs of Solomon," with 
the exception of some Jahvist cant about "the fear of 
Jahveh." We hear from "the lips of knowledge" a 
reaffirmation of th'e "excellent things" said in the 
Anthologies about the superiority of Wisdom to gems. 
(The word "ancient" given by the revisers in the 
margin to viii. 18 may possibly signify the antiquity of 
the Anthologies when this Prologue was written.) The 
scholarly writer of the Prologue had closely studied the 
ancient proverbs, and occasionally gives good hints for 
the interpretation of some that puzzle modern trans- 
lators. Thus Wisdom, in describing herself as "sport- 
ing" (viii. 30), indicates the right meaning of x. 23 
to be that while the fool finds his sport in mischief, the 
wise man finds his sport with wisdom. (This proverb 
may also have suggested the laughter of the "virtuous 
woman" in xxxi. 25.) 

In viii. 22-31, Wisdom becomes more than a personi- 
fication, and takes her place in cosmogony. This pas- 
sage, which contains germs of much of our latter-day 
theology, must be quoted in full, and comparatively 
studied. Wisdom speaks : 

22. Jahveh acquired me in the outset of his way, 
Before his works, from of old. 

23. From eternity was I existent, 
From the first, before the earth. 



70 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

24. When no deep seas I was brought forward, 
When no fountains abounding with water. 

25. Before the mountains were fixed, 
Before the hills, was I brought forward ; 

2(>. When he had not fashioned the earth and the fields, 
And the consummate part of the dust of the world. 

27. When he established the heavens, I was there ; 
When he set a boundary on the face of the deep ; 

28. When he made firm the clouds above ; 

When the fountains of the deep became strong ; 

29. When he gave to the sea its limit, 

That the waters should not pass over their coast; 
When he marked out the foundation pillars of the earth : 

30. Then was I near him, as a master builder : 
And I was his delight continually, 
Sporting before him at all times ; 

31. Sporting in the habitable part of his earth, 
And my delight was with the sons of men. 

Let us compare with this picture of Wisdom that of 
Armaiti, genius of the Earth, in the sacred Zoroastrian 
books. In the Gatha Ahunavaiti, 7, it is said : "To 
succor this life (to increase it) Armaiti came with 
wealth, and good and true mind : she, the everlasting 
one, created the material world; but the soul, as to 
time, the first cause among created beings, was with 
thee" (Ahura Mazda). Thus, like Wisdom, Armaiti 
is everlasting: she was not created, but ''acquired," 
by the deity. When Ahura Mazda, as chief of the 
seven Amesha-spentas, ideally designed the world, she 
gave it reality, as master-builder, and, like Wisdom, 
hewed out the foundation pillars he had marked out, — 
namely, the Seven Karshvares of the earth. The open- 
ing lines of Proverbs ix. read almost like a quotation 
from some Gatha : 

"Wisdom hath builded her house, 
She hath hewn out her seven pillars." 



THE BOOK OF PROVERBS. 7 1 

Like Wisdom, Armaiti was the continual delight of 
the supreme God. In an ancient Pali MS., it is said 
that Zoroaster saw the supreme being in heaven, with 
Armaiti seated at his side, her hand caressing his neck, 
and said : ''Thou, who art Ahura Mazda, turnest not 
thy eyes away from her, and she turns not away from 
thee." Ahura Mazda tells Zoroaster that she is ''the 
house mistress of my heaven, and mother of the 
creatures."* Like Wisdom, Armaiti has joy in the 
"habitable part" of the earth, and the "sons of men," 
from whom she receives especial delight ("the greatest 
joy"), are enumerated in the Vendidad, also the places 
in which she has such delight. They are the faithful 
who cultivate the earth morally and physically, and the 
places so watered or drained, and homes "with wife, 
children, and good herds within." 

Armaiti has a daughter, "the good Ashi," whose 
function is to pass between earth and heaven and bring 
the heavenly wisdom (Vohu-Mano, "Good Thought") 
to mankind. The soul of the world thus reaches, and 
is reached by, heaven, and Armaiti thus becomes a per- 
sonification of the combined human and superhuman 
Wisdom ascribed to great men, such as Solomon. At 
the same time the "sons of men" are all the children of 
Armaiti, and she finds delight among them. Even the 
rudest are restrained by her culture. "By the eyes of 
Armaiti the (demonic) ruffian was made powerless," 
says Zoroaster. The spirit of the Earth, laughing with 
her flowers and fruits, survived in Persia the sombre 
reign of Islam, to sing in the quatrain of Omar Khay- 
yam : "I asked my fair bride — the World — what was 

* Sacred Books of /he East. Vol. XVIII. Pahlavi Texts tr. by West. 
The text quoted above (from p. 415) is of uncertain age, but it is harmonious 
with the more ancient scriptures, and no doubt compiled from them. 



72 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

her dower : she answered, *My dower is in the joy of thy 
heart.' " 

"The sons of men" is not an Avestan phrase, for to 
Armaiti her daughters are as dear as her sons, but we 
find in the Vendidad "the seeds of men and women." 
These are sprung from those who were selected for 
preservation in the Vara, or enclosure, of the first man, 
Yimi, made by direction of the deity, when the evil 
powers brought fatal winters on the world. The de- 
formed, diseased, wicked, were excluded ; the chosen 
people were those formed of "the best of the earth." 
From long and prosperous life on earth, the Amesha of 
immortality, the good angel of death, conducted them 
to eternal happiness ; they are the immortals, children 
of the demons being mortals. There was something 
corresponding to this in the Jewish idea of their being 
a chosen people, as distinguished from the Gentile 
world (see Deut. xxxii. 8), and no doubt the phrase 
"sons of men" represented a divine dignity afterwards 
expressed in the title, "Son of Man."* 

The Solomonic hymn of Wisdom at the creation 
(Proverbs viii. 22-31) contains other Avestan phrases. 
"From eternity was I existent," recalls Zervan akarana, 

* Among the cultured Jews, just before our era, there was a recognition 
of the equality of men, as is seen in the Wisdom of Solomon vii. i, "I myself 
am a mortal man, like to all, and the offspring of him that was first made of 
the earth." Solomon ascribes his superiority only to the divine gift of wis- 
dom. This idea of human equality was in the preaching of John the Baptist 
(Matt. iii. 9) — probably a Parsi heretic, at any rate an apostle of purifying 
water and fire — and it underlay the title of Jesus, "Son of Man." That in 
Armaiti there was a conception of a humanity not represented by race but by 
character and culture will appear by a comparison with the Vedic Aramati, 
a bride of Agni (Fire) to whom she is mythologically related, on the one 
hand, and on the other to the spirit of the earth who came to the assistance 
of Buddha. This story, related in many forms, is that when the evil Mara, 
having tempted Buddha in vain, brought his hosts to terrify him, all friends 
forsooK him. and no angel came to help him, but the spirit of the earth, 
which he had watered, arose as a fair woman, who from her long hair wrung 
out the water Buddha had bestowed which became a flood and swept away 
the evil host. Watering the Earth is especially mentioned in the Avesta as 
that which makes her rejoice, and marks the holy man. 



THE BOOK OF PROVERBS. 73 

"boundless time," and verse 26, relating to the earth, 
is still more significant : in it "the sum" has been sug- 
gested by the Revisers for (E. V.) "the highest part" 
(of the earth), but in either rendering it is near to the 
Avestan phrase, "the best of Armaiti" (Earth). This 
phrase is reproduced in the Bundahis (xv. 6), where 
the creator, Ahura Mazda, says to the first pair, "You 
are men (cf. Genesis v. 2, he 'called their name Adam'), 
you are the ancestry of the world, and you are created 
the best of Armaiti (the Earth) by me." (West's 
translation. Sacred Books of the East. Vol. V., p. 
54, n. 2.) The word for Earth in Proverb 26 is 
adainah, and in the Septuagint (various reading) it is 
actually translated Ap/iacd, — Armaiti's very name. We 
may thus find in Proverb 26 (viii.) the idea of Omar 
Khayyam, "Man is the whole creation's summary." 

Whether there is any connexion between the Sanskrit 
Adima and Hebrew Adam is still under philological 
discussion : probably not, for their meaning is differ- 
ent, Adima meaning "the first," and Adam relating to 
the material out of which he is said to have been formed. 
Adam is derived from Adamah : after all, man came 
from the great Woman — "the Mother of all living."* 
Adamah, according to Sale, is a Persian word meaning 
"red earth," and in Hebrew also it connotes redness. 
Armaiti might have acquired an epithet of ruddiness 
from her union with Atar, the genius of Fire ( Fargard 
xviii. 51, 52. Darmesteter. Introduction, iv. 30). In 
Hebrew adamah combines three senses — a fortress, 

* Even in the legend in Genesis ii. the " rib " is a misunderstanding. 
Eve (Chavah) was the female side of Adam, which was the name of both 
male and female (Gen. v. 2). The "rib" story arose no doubt from the 
supposition that Adam's allusion to "bone of my bone" had something to 
do with it. But Adam's phrase is an idiom meaning only "Thou art the 
same as I am." (Max Miiller's Science of Religion, p. 47.) 



74 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

redness, and cultivated ground. In Proverbs (viii. 
31) we have the fortress or enclosure, ''the habitable 
part of his earth"; in verse 26 the cultivated earth, 
"the highest part (or sum, or best) of the dust of the 
earth." The ''delight" in which Wisdom dwelt (verse 
30) is Eden, the garden of delight, and in verse 31 this 
delight associated with the human children of the earth. 
Here we have the elements of the narrative of the cre- 
ation of Adam in Genesis, and of the garden, though 
clearly not derived from Genesis. And in Genesis 
we find something like a personification of the earth, 
as in ix. 13, "It (the rainbow) shall be a token of a 
covenant between me and the earth." 

The idea of a creative deity requiring, as in Proverbs 
viii., the assistance of another personal being, is for- 
eign to Jahvism, but it is of the very substance of 
Zoroastrianism, and it reappears in the Elohism of 
Genesis. Another important and fundamental fact is, 
that we find in the prologue to Proverbs a deity con- 
tending against something, circumscribing forces that 
need control, not of his creation. It is plain that the 
conception of monotheistic omnipotence had not yet 
been formed. There are higher and lower parts of the 
earth. 

Although there is no evidence that any such compila- 
tion as our ''Genesis" existed at the time when the pro- 
logue (viii., ix.) to the "Proverbs of Solomon" was 
composed, the Elohistic opening of Genesis, especially 
in its original form, harmonises with the Parsi conflict 
between Light and Darkness. 

"When of old Elohim separated heaven and earth — when 
the earth was desolation and emptiness — darkness on the face 



THE BOOK OF PROVERBS. 75 

of the deep, and the spirit of Elohim brooding on the face of 
the waters, — Elohim said, Be Light; Light was."* 

The spirit of God "brooding" over the waters (Gene- 
sis i. i) may be identified with the Wisdom of Prov- 
erbs ix. I, who "builds her house" as the Elohim built 
the universe, and "hath hewn out her seven pillars" 
like a true Armaiti, ''Queen of the Seven." She is the 
Spirit of Light. And perhaps the darkness that was 
on the face of the abyss suggested the antagonistic per- 
sonification in the next chapter (ix.) named by Pro- 
fessor Cheyne "Dame Folly." Wisdom, having builded 
her house, spread her table, mingled her wine, sends 
forth her maidens to invite the simple to forsake Folly, 
enjoy her feast, and "live." Dame Folly, — who though 
she has "a seat in high places" is "silly," — clamours to 
every wayfarer that even the bread and water of her 
table, being surreptitious, are sweeter than the luxuries 
and wine offered by Wisdom. This appears to be the 
meaning of Dame Folly's somewhat obscure invitation. 

" 'Waters stolen are sweet ! 
Forbidden bread is pleasant!' 
He knoweth not her phantoms are there, 
That her guests are in the underworld." 



* These two, darkness and the brooding spirit, may seem to be related to 
the raven and the dove sent out of the ark oy Noah, but this account only 
indicates the origin of the story of the Deluge; for the raven was in Persia 
an emblem of victory, and in the Biblical legend it was the only living creature 
that defied the Deluge and was able to do without the ark. In the corres- 
ponding legend in the Avesta, where King Yima makes an enclosure (Vara) 
for the shelter of the seeds of all living creatures, the heavenly bird Kar- 
shipta brings into that refuge the law of Ahura Mazda, and as the song of 
this bird was the voice of Ahura Mazda, it may have been an idealised dove 

(" For lo, the winter is past. 

The rain is over and gone .... 

The voice of the turtle is heard in the land.") 
But when Yima lent himself to the lies of the Evil One his (Yima's) "glory" 
left him in the form of a raven (Zambad Yast, 36). But both the raven and 
the dove were tribal ensigns, and it is not safe to Duild too much on what is 
said of them in Eastern and Oriental books. 



76 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

In this contrast between Wisdom inviting all to enter 
her house, drink her wine, and "live," and Folly inviting 
them to her "Sheol," we have nearly a quatrain of Omar 
Khayyam : "Since from the beginning of life to its end 
there is for thee only this earth, at least live as one who 
is on it and not under it." 

In the Avesta the good and wise Mother Earth 
(Armaiti) is opposed by a malign female ''Drug" 
(demoness), whose paramours are described in Far- 
gard xviii. (Vendidad). These two are fairly repre- 
sented by Wisdom and Folly as personified in Proverbs 
viii. and ix. 

The Jahvist who in Proverbs i. 1-7 (excepting the 
first six verses) undertakes to edit the original and 
ancient editor as well as Solomon, presents the curious 
case of one of Dame Folly's phantoms interpreting the 
words of Wisdom's guests. Unable to comprehend 
their portraiture of Dame Folly, he imagines that the 
allusion must be to harlotry, admonishes his "son" that 
"Jahveh giveth wisdom," which among other things 
will "deliver thee from the strange woman," whose 
"house sinketh down to the underworld and her paths 
unto phantoms." Which recalls the pious lady who on 
hearing her ritualistic pastor accused by a dissenter of 
leanings toward the Scarlet Woman, anxiously in- 
quired of a friend whether she had ever heard any scan- 
dal connected with their vicar's name ! 

Our Jahvist editor seems to be one who would often 
say of laughter "it is mad" ; and naturally could not 
imagine how Wisdom could "sport" before the Lord 
(viii. 30) unless she were in some sense mad. The 
sport before Jahveh could only be in mockery of some 
sinner's torment, like the derision ascribed to Jahveh 



THE BOOK OF PROVERBS. 77 

(Psalm ii. 4) ; consequently our editor represents Wis- 
dom crying abroad in the streets : 

"Because I have called and ye refused .... 
I also will laugh in the day of your calamity, 
I will mock when your fear cometh." 

But Pliny mentions the Mazdean belief, confirmed by 
Parsi tradition, that Zoroaster was born laughing. To 
him Ahura Mazda says : *'Do thou proclaim, O pure 
Zoroaster, the vigor, the glory, the help and the joy that 
are in the Fravashis (souls) of the faithful." 

However, we may see in these first seven chapters of 
Proverbs that Wisdom had become detached from the 
sons of men, in whom she had once found delight, was 
no longer in the human heart, but had finally ascended 
to wield the heavenly thunderbolts. And yet it is 
probable that we owe to this vindictive and menacing 
attitude of deified Wisdom the preservation of so many 
witty and sceptical things in books traditionally ascribed 
to Solomon. The orthodox legend being that the Lord 
had put supernatural wisdom into Solomon's heart, and 
never revoked it despite his "idolatry" and secularism, it 
followed that the naughty man could not help continu- 
ing to be a medium of this divine person. Wisdom, and 
that it might be a dangerous thing to suppress any 
utterance of hers through Solomon, — unwitting blas- 
phemy. However profane or worldly the writings 
might appear to the Jahvist mind, there was no know- 
ing what occult inspiration there might be in them, and 
the only thing editors could venture was to sprinkle 
through them plenteous disinfectants in the way of 
"Fear-of-the-Lord" wisdom. 

The proverbs in which the name Jahveh appears are 
not, of course, to be indiscriminately rejected as entirely 



78 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

Jahvist interpolations. It seems probable that little 
more than the word Jahveh has been supplied in some 
of these, — e. g., xix. 3, xx. 27, xxi. i, 3, xxviii. 5, xxix. 
26. But in a majority of cases the proverbs containing 
the name Jahveh are ethically and radically inharmon- 
ious with the substance and spirit of the book as a 
whole, which is founded on the supremacy of human 
''merits" as fully as Zoroastrianism, in which salvation 
depends absolutely on Good Thought, Good Word, 
Good Deed. In dynamic monotheism (as distin- 
guished from ethical) of which Jahvism is the ancient 
and Islam the modern type, the doctrine of human 
"merits" is inadmissible: a man's virtues are not his 
own, and in Jahveh's sight they are but ''filthy rags,'* 
except so far as they are given by Jahveh. But in 
the Solomonic proverbs the highest virtues, and the 
supreme blessings of the universe, are obtained by a 
man's own wisdom, character, and deeds. And in some 
cases the claims for Jahveh appear to have been inserted 
as if in answer or retort to proverbs ignoring the par- 
ticipation of any deity in such high matters. I quote 
a few instances, in which the antithesis turns to 
antagonism : 

Solomon — By kindness and truth iniquity is atoned for. 

Jahvist — By the fear of Jahveh men turn away from evil, 
(xvi. 6.) 
Solomon — He who is skilful in a matter findeth good. 

Jahvist — Whoso trusteth in Jahveh, happy is he! (xvi. 20.) 

In several other cases entire proverbs seem to be 
inserted for the correction of preceding ones, — ^these 
being not always understood by the interpolator : 

Solomon — Treasures of evil profit not, 

But virtue delivereth from death. 



THE BOOK OF PROVERBS. 79 

Jahvist — Jahveh will not suffer the righteous man to be 
famished, 
But the desires of the unrighteous he thrusteth 
away. (x. 2, 3.) 
Solomon — The tongue of the just is choice silver; 
The heart of the evil is little worth : 
The lips of the just feed many, 
But fools die through heartlessness. 
Jahvist — The blessing of Jahveh, that maketh rich, 

And work addeth nothing thereto, (x. 20-22.) 
Solomon — The virtuous man hath an everlasting foundation, 
(x. 25.) 
Jahvist — The fear of Jahveh prolongeth days. (x. 27.) 
Solomon — Hear counsel, receive correction, 

That thou mayst be wise in thy future. 
Jahvist — Many are the purposes in a man's heart, 

But the counsel of Jahveh, that shall stand, (xix. 
20-1.) 
Solomon — The acceptableness of a man is his kindness : 
Better off the poor than the treacherous man. 
Jahvist — The fear of Jahveh addeth to life ; 

Whoso is filled therewith shall abide, he shall not 
be visited by evil. (xix. 22-3.) 
Solomon — The upright man considereth his way. 
Jahvist — Wisdom is nothing, heart nothing. 

Counsel nothing, against Jahveh. (xxi. 29, 30.) 

In one instance the Jahvist has made a slip by which 
his hand is confessed. In xvii. 3 we find : 

The fining-pot is for silver, and the furnace for gold. 
But Jahveh trieth hearts. 

But he omitted to notice the repetition in xxvii. 21, 
where we find the profound sentence which the Jahvist 
had reduced to commonplace : 

The fining-pot for silver and the furnace for gold, 
And a man is proved by that which he praiseth. 

The Jahvist spirit is also discoverable in xx. 22; 



8o SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

Solomon — Say not "I will retaliate evil" ; 
Jahvist — Wait for Jahveh and he will save thee. 

Also in XXV. 21-2 : 

Solomon — If he that hateth thee be hungry, give him bread 
to eat, 
If he be athirst give him water to drink. 
Jahvist — For thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head. 
And Jahveh shall reward thee. 

A similar mean and vindictive spirit is shown in xxiv. 
18, following a magnanimous proverb ; but in verse 29, 
probably more ancient than 18, we find the unqualified 
rebuke of retaliation : 

Say not "As he hath done to me, so will I do to him, 
I will render to the man according to his work." 

It was this generosity that Buddha exercised,* and 
Jesus; and it was left to Paul to recover the Jahvist 
modifications of Solomon's wisdom in order to adul- 
terate for hard Romans the humane spirit of Jesus 
(Romans xii. 19, 20). The Solomonic sentences are 
normally so magnanimous as to throw suspicion on any 
clause tainted with smallness or vulgarity. The per- 
vading spirit is, "The benevolent heart shall be enriched, 
and he who watereth shall himself be watered." 

There is one proverb (xiv. 32) which suggests a 

belief in immortality, or possibly in the Angel of Death : 

By his evil deeds the evil man is thrust downward. 
But the virtuous man hath confidence in his death. 

According to the Avesta every man is born with an 
invisible noose around his neck. When a good man 
dies the noose falls, and he passes to a beautiful region 
where he is met by a maid, to whom he says, "Who 
art thou, who art the fairest I have ever seen?" She 

* See my Sacred Anthology ^ p. 240. 



THE BOOK OF PROVERBS. 8 1 

answers, "O thou of good thoughts, good words, good 
deeds, I am thy actions." The evil man meets a leprous 
hag, embodiment of his actions, who by his noose drags 
him down through the evil-thought hell, the evil-word 
hell, the evil-deed hell, to the region of ''Endless Dark- 
ness" (Yast xxii.). This darkness may be metaphoric- 
ally spoken of in Proverbs xx. 20 : 

He that curseth his father and mother, 

His lamp shall be put out in the blackest darkness. 

But generally the allusions to death in the Solo- 
monic proverbs do not seem to allude to physical death. 
In X. 2 'Virtue delivereth from death" is in antithesis 
to the unprofitableness of evil treasures, and in 16 : 

The reward of a virtuous man is life ; 
The gain of the wicked is sin. 

Here "life" and "sin" are in opposition. Other sen- 
tences to be compared are : 

The teaching of the wise is a fountain of life, 

To avoid the snares of death, (xiii. 14, cf. the Jahvist xiv. 27.) 

Understanding is a fountain of life to those who possess it, 

But the snare of fools is Folly, (xvi. 22.) 

He that hateth reproof shall die. (xv. 10.) 

The way of life is upward to the wise, 

So as to turn away from the grave (sheol) beneath, (xv. 24.) 

Death and life are in the power of the tongue, 

And they who love it shall eat its fruit, (xviii. 21.) 

(In the last clause "it" probably refers to "life," 
unless the pronoun be cancelled altogether.) 

The getting of treasures by a tongue of falsehood 

Is getting a fleeting vapour, delusions of death, (xxi. 6.) 

In the way of virtue is life, 

But the way of the by-path leadeth to death, (xii. 28.) 

The man who wandereth from the way of instruction 

Shall rest in the congregation of the phantoms, (xxi. 16.) 



82 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

The two proverbs last quoted may be usefully com- 
pared with the ancient Prologue (viii. ix.) already 
referred to in this chapter, as they are there reproduced 
pictorially in Wisdom and Dame Folly sitting at 
their respective doors. Wisdom offers long life and 
happiness : 

But he who wandereth from me doeth violence to his own life, 
All who hate me love death, (viii. 36.) 

Dame Folly tries to turn into her by-path those who 
are ''proceeding straight in their course" (ix. 15), but 
her victim — 

He knoweth not her phantoms are there, 

That her guests are in the underworld, (ix. 18.) 

The same Hebrew word, Rephahn (phantoms or 
shades) is used here and in xxi. 16. 

All of these references to death and the underworld 
(sheol), except perhaps xiv. 32, refer to the living 
death, moral and spiritual, which is of such vast and 
fundamental significance in Zoroastrian religion. In 
this religion the evil power is "all death." The uni- 
verse is divided by and into "the living and the not liv- 
ing."* "When these two Spirits came together they 
made first Life and Death," — words sometimes used as 
synonymous with the "Good and the Evil Mind." 
Ahura Mazda representing all the forces that work for 
health and life, Angromainyu (Ahriman) all that work 
for disease and destruction, have ranged with them all 
animals and plants, on one side or the other, in this great 
conflict. The life of an Ahrimanian creature is "incar- 
nate death." (Darmesteter's Introduction to the Ven- 

* Gaya and ajyaiti, translated by Haug " reality and unreality " {Parsis, 
p. 303). The translation "living and not living" was sent me by Prof. Max 
Miiller in answer to a request for a careful rendering. 



THE BOOK OF PROVERBS. 83 

didad, V. II.) His destructiveness is equally against 
virtue, wisdom, peace, health, happiness, life, and all 
of these, not merely physical dissolution, are included 
in his Avestan title, ''The Fiend who is all death." He 
is the Abaddon of Revelation ix. 11, also he "that had 
the power of death" in Hebrews ii. 14, and probably 
came into both of these from Proverbs xxvii. 20 : 

Sheol and Abaddon are never satisfied, 
And the eyes of man are never satisfied. 

Dr. Inman (^Ancient Faiths, i., p. 180) connects 
Abaddon with ''Abadan (cuneiform), the lost one, the 
sun in winter, or darkness," which conforms with the 
Avestan Ahriman, who is emphatically a winter-demon, 
his hell being in the north (cf. Jeremiah i. 14 and else- 
where), and is the natural adversary of the Fire-wor- 
shipper. 

Among the Zoroastrians there were not only Towers 
of Silence (Dakhma) for the literally dead, but also for 
the confinement of those tainted by carrying corpses, 
or by any contact with the death-fiend's empire, such as 
being struck with temporary death. "The unclean," 
says Darmesteter, "are confined in a particular place, 
apart from all clean persons and objects, the Armest- 
gah, which may be described, therefore, as the Dakhma 
for the living." Here then are the dead-alive guests 
of Dame Folly (Proverbs ix. 15), who opposes Wis- 
dom, as Ahriman created Akem-Mano (evil thought) 
to oppose Vohu-Mano (good thought), and here is the 
assembly that might give the Solomonic proverb its 
metaphor : 

The man who wandereth from the way of instruction 
Shall rest in the congregation of the phantoms (or shades, 
Rephaxm). 



84 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

The Zoroastrian books from which I have been quot- 
ing contain passages of very unequal date, but it is 
the opinion of Avestan scholars that most of them are 
from very ancient sources, pre-Solomonic, and there is 
no chronological difficulty in supposing that such insti- 
tutions as the Armest-gah, for the separation of the 
unclean, should not have been well known in ancient 
Jerusalem before the corresponding levitical laws con- 
cerning the unclean and the leprous existed. 

The Book of Proverbs was also a growth, and 
although, as has been stated, there is reason to regard 
as later additions most of the proverbs containing the 
word Jahveh, as they are inconsistent with the general 
ethical tenor of the book, there are several in which that 
name is evidently out of place. Even in the editorial 
Prologue we can hardly recognize orthodox Jahvism 
in the conception of a being, Wisdom, not created by 
Jahveh yet giving him delight and some kind of assist- 
ance at the creation ; and nowhere else in the Old Tes- 
tament do we find such an idea as that of xx. 27, "The 
spirit of a man is Jahveh's lamp," or in xix. 17 : 

He who is kind to the poor lendeth to Jahveh, 
And his good deed shall be recompensed to him. 

But in the Zoroastrian religion men and women render 
assistance and encouragement to the gods, and we find 
the chief deity, Ahura Mazda, saying to Zoroaster con- 
cerning the Fravashis, or souls, of holy men and 
women: "Do thou proclaim, O pure Zoroaster, the 
vigor and strength, the glory, the help and the joy, that 
are in the Fravashis of the faithful .... do thou tell 
how they came to help me, how they bring assistance 
unto me. . . . Through their brightness and glory, O 
Zoroaster, I maintain that sky there above." Favardin 



THE BOOK OF PROVERBS. 85 

Yast, I, 2.) As Frederick the Great said, *'a king is 
the chief of subjects," so with Zoroaster Ahura Mazda 
is the chief of the faithful; or, as Luther said, "God 
is strong, but he Hkes to be helped." 

The similitude in Proverbs xx. 27 is especially impor- 
tant in our inquiry : 

The spirit of man is the lamp of Jahveh, 
Searching all the chambers of the body. 

The word for '"spirit" here is Nishma, which occurs 
in but one other instance in the Bible, namely, in Job 
xxvi. 4. Job asks : 

To whom hast thou uttered words? 
And whose spirit came forth from thee? 

This chapter of Job (xxvi.) is closely related to 
Proverbs viii. and ix., both in thought and phraseology : 
the Rephaim, or phantoms, the "'pillars," the ordering 
of earth and clouds, the boundary on the deep ; and 
there is an allusion to "the confines of Light and Dark- 
ness," which point to the domains of Wisdom and Dame 
Folly. Job and the proverbialist surely got these ideas 
from the same source, and also the word nishma, trans- 
lated "spirit," which throughout the Old Testament is 
ruach, save in the two texts indicated. But there is no 
text in the Bible where ruach, spirit, or soul, is associ- 
ated with light like the nishma of the proverb, and in 
Job nishma evidently means a superhuman spirit. 
Now there is a Chaldean word, nisma, which in the 
Persian Boundahis appears as nismo, and is translated 
by West, "living soul." The ordinary word for soul in 
the Parsi scriptures seems to be ruhdn, and West 
regards the two words as meaning the same thing, 
the breath, or soul, basing this on the following passage 



S6 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

of the Bundahis, representing the separation of the first 
mortal into the first human pair, Mashya and Mashyoi : 
"And the waists of both were brought dose, and so con- 
nected together that it was not clear which is the male and 
which the female, and which is the one whose living soul 
(nismo) of Auharmazd (God) is not away (lacking). As it 
is said thus: 'Which is created before, the soul (nismo) or 
the body? And Auharmazd said that the soul is created 
before, and the body after, for him who was created; it is 
given unto the body to produce activity, and the body is cre- 
ated only for activity; hence the conclusion is this, that the 
soul (ruban) is created before and the body after. And both 
of them changed from the shape of a plant into the shape of 
man, and the breath (nismo) went spiritually into them, which 
is the soul (ruban)."* 

With all deference to the learned translator, I cannot 
think his exegesis here quite satisfactory. In the first 
sentence nismo is the breath of God ; and although in 
the second the same word is used for the human soul, 
the writer seems to have aimed in the last sentence at a 
distinction: the divine breath or spirit (nismo) creates 
a soul (ruban), to receive which the plant is trans- 
formed into a body fitted for the "activity" of an 
imbreathed soul. West twice translates nismo "living 
soul," but ruban only "soul." Does not this indicate 
Ahura Mazda as the source of divine life, as in Genesis 
ii. 7, where Jahveh-Elohim breathes into man, who 
becomes a "living soul," — a, being within the domain 
of the god of life, not subject to the god of death? Is 
it not his ruban that is the image of nismo f (Cf. Gene- 
sis ix. 5, 6.) 

Turning now to the Avesta, we find the famous Fav- 
ardin Yast, a collection of litanies and ascriptions to the 
Fravashis. "The Fravashi," says Darmesteter, "is the 

* Sacred Books of the East. Vol. V., pp. i6, 53-54. Text and notes. 



THE BOOK OF PROVERBS, 8j 

inner power in every being that maintains it and makes 
it grow and subsist. Originally the Fra-vashis were the 
same as the Pitris of the Hindus or the Manes of the 
Latins, that is to say, the everlasting and deified souls 
of the dead ; but in course of time they gained a wider 
domain, and not only men, but gods and even physical 
objects, like the sky and the earth, had each a Fravashi." 
"The Fravashi was independent of the circumstances of 
life or death, an immortal part of the individual which 
existed before man and outlived him." 

In Yast xxii. 39, 40, it is said : "O Maker, how do 
the souls of the dead, the Fravashis of the holy Ones, 
manifest themselves?" Ahura Mazda answered: 
"They manifest themselves from goodness of spirit and 
excellence of mind." 

Favardin Yast, 9: "Through their brightness and 
glory, O Zarathrustra, I maintain the wide earth," etc. 
12 : "Had not the awful Fravashis of the faithful given 
help unto me, those animals and men of mine, of which 
there are such excellent kinds, would not subsist; 
strength would belong to the fiend." 

In other verses these Fravashis (the word means 
"protectors") help the children unborn, nourish health, 
develop the wise. The imagery relating to them is 
largely related to the stars, of which many are guar- 
dians. These are probably the origin of the Solomonic 
similitude of reason, "The spirit (nishma) of man is 
the lamp of ?" 

With all of these correspondences between the Solo- 
monic proverbs, nothing is more remarkable than their 
originality, so far as any ancient scriptures are con- 
cerned. While they are totally different from the 
Psalms, in showing man as a citizen of the world, rely- 



88 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

ing on himself and those around him for happiness, and 
exahing nothing above human virtue and intelHgence, 
without any reUgious fervor or wrath, the proverbialist 
is equally far from the ethical superstitions of Zoroas- 
trian religion, which abounds in fictitious "merits" and 
anathematises fictitious immoralities. It is as if some 
sublime Eastern pedlar and banker of ethical and poetic 
gems, who had come in contact with Oriental litera- 
tures, bad separated from their liturgies and prophecies 
the nuggets of gold and the precious stones, polishing, 
resetting, and exciting others to do the like. At the 
same time many of the sentences are the expressions of 
an original mind, a man of letters, neither Eastern nor 
Oriental, and these may be labelled with the line of the 
Persian poet Faizi : "Take Faizi's Diwan to bear wit- 
ness to the wonderful speeches of a freethinker who 
belongs to a thousand sects." 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE SONG OF SONGS. 

The praise of the virtuous woman, at the close of the 
Proverbs, is given a Jahvist turn by verse 30 : '^Favour 
is deceitful and beauty vain ; but a woman that feareth 
the Lord, she shall be praised." But the Solomonists 
also had their ideas of the virtuous woman, and of 
beauty, these being beautifully expressed in a series 
of dramatic idylls entitled The Song of Songs. To this 
latter, in the original title, is added, ''which is Solo- 
mon's" ; and it confirms what has been said concerning 
the superstitious awe of everything proceeding from 
Solomon, and the dread of insulting the Holy Spirit of 
Wisdom supernaturally lodged in him, that we find in 
the Bible these passionate love songs. And indeed 
Solomon must have been superlatively wise to have 
written poems in which his greatness is slightly ridi- 
culed. That of course would be by no means incredible 
in a man of genuine wisdom — on the contrary would be 
characteristic — if other conditions were met by the tra- 
dition of his authorship. 

At the outset, however, we are confronted by the 
question whether the Song of Songs has any general 
coherency or dramatic character at all. Several mod- 
ern critics of learning, among them Prof. Karl Budde 
and the late Edward Reuss, find the book a collection of 
unconnected lyrics, and Professor Cornill of Konigs- 

89 



90 SOLOMONIC LITERA2URE. 

berg has added the great weight of his name to that 
opinion (Einleitung in das Alte Testament. 1891). 
Unfortunately Professor Cornill's treatment is brief, 
and not accompanied by a complete analysis of the 
book. He favors as a principle Reuss's division of 
Canticles into separate idylls, and thinks most readers 
import into this collection of songs an imaginary sys- 
tem and significance. This is certainly true of the 
"allegorical" purport, aim, and religious ideas ascribed 
to the book, but Professor Cornill's reference to Herder 
seems to leave the door open for further treatment of 
the Song of Songs from a purely literary standpoint. 
He praises Herder's discernment in describing the book 
as a string of pearls, but passes without criticism or 
denial Herder's further view that there are indications 
of editorial modifications of some of the lyrics. For 
what purpose? Herder also pointed out that various 
individualities and conditions are represented. This 
indeed appears undeniable: here are prince and shep- 
herd, the tender mother, the cruel brothers, the rough 
watchman, the dancer, the bride and bridegroom. The 
dramatis personce are certainly present : but is there 
any drama? 

Admitting that there was no ancient Hebrew 
theatre, the question remains whether among the later 
Hellenic Jews the old songs were not arranged, and 
new ones added, in some kind of Singspiele or vaude- 
ville. There seems to be a chorus. It is hardly con- 
sistent with the general artistic quality of the compila- 
tion that the lady should say 'T am swarthy hut comely," 
or ''I am a lily of the valley" (a gorgeous flower). 
Surely the compliments are ejaculations of the chorus. 
And may we not ascribe to a chorus the questions, "Who 



THE SONG OF SONGS, 91 

is this that cometh up out of the wilderness?" etc. 

(iii. 6-10.) "What is thy beloved more than another 
beloved"? (v. 9.) "Who is this that cometh up from 
the wilderness leaning on her beloved"? (viii, 5). 

As in the modern vaudeville songs are often intro- 
duced without any special relation to the play, so we 
find in Canticles some songs that might be transposed 
from one chapter to another without marring the work, 
but is this the case with all of them ? The song in the 
first chapter, for instance, in which the damsel, brought 
by the King into his palace, tells the ladies of the home 
she left, and of maltreatment by her brothers, who took 
her from her own vineyard and made her work in theirs, 
where she was sunburnt, — this could not be placed 
effectively at the end of the book, nor the triumphant 
line, "My vineyard, which is mine own, is before me," 
be set at the beginning. This is but one of several 
instances that might be quoted. Even pearls may be 
strung with definite purpose, as in a rosary, and how 
perfectly set is the great rose, — the hymn to Love in 
the final chapter ! Or to remember Professor Cornill's 
word Scenenzvechsel, along with his affirmation that the 
love of human lovers is the burden of the "unrivalled" 
book, there are some sequences and contrasts which do 
convey an impression of dissolving views, and occa- 
sionally reveal a connexion between separate tableaux. 
For example the same words (which I conjecture to 
be those of a chorus) are used to introduce Solomon in 
pompous palanquin with grand escort, that are presently 
used to greet the united lovers. 
"Who is this that cometh up from the wilderness Hke pillars 

of smoke?" (iii, 6.) 
"Who is this that cometh up from the wilderness 

Leaning on her beloved?" (viii, 5.) 



92 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

These are five chapters apart, yet surely they may be 
supposed connected without Hineininterpretation. Any 
single contrast of this kind might be supposed a mere 
coincidence, but there are two others drawn between 
the swarthy maiden and the monarch. The tableau of 
Solomon in his splendor dissolves into another of his 
Queen Mother crowning him on the day of his espousal : 
that of Shulamith leaning on her beloved dissolves into 
another of her mother pledging her to her lover in 
espousals under an apple tree. And then we find (viii. 
II, 12) Solomon's distant vineyards tended by many 
hirelings contrasted with Shulamith's own little vine- 
yard tended by herself. 

The theory that the book is a collection of bridal 
songs, and that the mention of Solomon is due to an 
eastern custom of designating the bridegroom and bride 
as Solomon and Queen Shulamith, during their honey- 
moon, does not seem consistent with the fact that in 
several allusions to Solomon his royal state is slighted, 
whereas only compliments would be paid to a bride- 
groom. Moreover the two — Shulamith and Solomon 
— are not as persons named together. It will, I think, 
appear as we proceed that the Shelomoh (Solomon) of 
Canticles represents a conventionalisation of the mon- 
arch, with some traits not found in any other book in 
the Bible. A verse near the close, presently considered, 
suggests that the bride and bridegroom are at that one 
point metaphorically pictured as a Solomon and Solo- 
mona, indicating one feature of the Wise Man's con- 
ventionalization. 

Renan assigned Canticles the date B. C. 992-952, 
mainly because in it Tirza is coupled with Jerusalem. 
Tirza was a capital only during those years, and at 



THE SONG OF SONGS. 93 

any later period was too insignificant a town to be 
spoken of as in the Song vi. 4 : 

"Thou art beautiful, O my love, as Tirzah, 
Comely as Jerusalem, 
Dazzling as bannered ranks." 

But the late Russell Martineau, a thorough and un- 
biassed scholar, points out in the work phrases from 
Greek authors of the third century B. C, and assigns a 
date not earlier than 247 — 222.^ But may it not be 
that the Alexandrian of the third century built on 
some earlier foundation, as Shakespeare adapted the 
"Pound of Flesh" and the "Three Caskets" "(Merchant 
of Venice) from tales traceable as far back as early 
Buddhist literature? or as Marlowe and Goethe used 
the mediaeval legend of Faustus ? 

The several songs can hardly be assigned to one and 
the same century. The coupling of Tirza and Jeru- 
salem points to a remote past for that particular lyric, 
and is it credible that any Jew after Josiah's time could 
have written the figleafless songs so minutely descrip- 
tive of Shulamith's physical charms ? Could any Jew- 
ish writer of the third century before our era have writ- 
ten iv. 1-7 or vii. 1-9, regarding no name or place as 
too sacred to be pressed into his hyperboles of rapture 
at every detail of the maiden's form, and have done this 
in perfect innocency, without a blush? Or if such a 
poet could have existed in the later Jahvist times, would 
his songs have found their place in the Jewish canon? 
As it was the book was admitted only with a provision 
that no Jew under thirty years of age should read it. 
That it was included at all was due to the occult pious 
meanings read into it by rabbins, while it is tolerably 

* American Journal of Philology. Vol. III. 



94 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE, 

certain that the reaHstic flesh-painting would have been 
expunged but for sanctions of antiquity similar to those 
which now protect so many old classics from expurga- 
tion by the Vice Societies. These songs, sensuous 
without sensuality, with their Oriental accent, seem 
ancient enough to have been brought by Solomon from 
Ophir. 

On the other hand a critical reader can hardly 
ascribe the whole book to the Solomonic period. The 
exquisite exaltation of Love, as a human passion (viii. 
6, 7), brings us into the refined atmosphere amid which 
Eros was developed, and it is immediately followed by 
a song that hardly rises above doggerel (viii. 8, 9). 
This is an interruption of the poem that looks as if sug- 
gested by the line that follows it (first line of verse 10) 
and meant to be comic. It impresses me as a very late 
interpolation, and by a hand inferior to the Alexandrian 
artist who in style has so well matched the more ancient 
pieces in his literary mosaic. Herder finds the collec- 
tion as a whole Solomonic, and makes the striking sug- 
gestion that its author at a more mature age would 
take the tone of Ecclesiasticus. 

Considered simply as a literary production, the com- 
position makes on my own mind the impression of a 
romance conveyed in idylls, each presenting a pictur- 
esque situation or a scene, the general theme and \notif 
being that of the great Solomonic Psalm. 

This psalm (xlv.),, quoted and discussed in chapter 
III,, brings before us a beautiful maiden broughit 
from a distant region to the court, but not quite happy : 
she is entreated to forget her people and enjoy the dig- 
nities and luxuries offered by her lord, the King. This 
psalm is remarkable in its intimations of a freedom of 



THE SONG OF SONGS. 95 

sentiment accorded to the ladies wooed by Solomon, and 
the same spirit pervades Canticles. Its chief refrain is 
that love must not be coerced or awakened until it 
please. This magnanimity might naturally connect 
the name of Solomon with old songs of love and court- 
ship such as those utilised and multiplied in this book, 
whose composition might be naturally entitled "A Song 
(made) of Songs which are Solomon's." 

The heroine, whose name is Shulamith, — (feminine 
of Shelomoh, Solomon)* — is an only daughter, cher- 
ished by her apparently widowed mother but maltreated 
by her brothers. Incensed against her, they compel 
Shulamith to keep their vineyards to the neglect of her 
own. She becomes sunburnt, "swarthy," but is very 
"attractive," and is brought by Solomon to his palace, 
where she delights the ladies by her beauty and dances. 
In what I suppose to be one of the ancient Solomonic 
Songs embodied in the work it is said : 

* In I Chron. iii. lO Shelomith is a descendant of Solomon. In these 
studies " Abishag the Shunamith," i Kings, i. 2, has been conjecturally con- 
nected with Psalm xlv., and the identity of her name with Shulamith has 
also been mentioned. This identity of the names was suggested by Gesenius 
and accepted by Fiirst, Renan, and others. Abishag is thus also a sort of 
"Solomona." In i Kings i. there is some indication of a lacuna between 
verses 4 and 5. "And the damsel (Abishag) was very fair; and she cherished 
the King and ministered to him; but the King knew her not. Then" — what? 
why, all about Adonijah's effort to become king! David did not marry 
Abishag ; she remained a maiden after his death and free to wed either of 
the brothers. The care with which this is certified was probably followed by 
some story either of her cleverness or of her relations with Solomon which 
gave her the name Shunamith — Shulamith — Solomona. Of the Shunamith it 
IS said they found her far away and "brought her to the King," and in the 
beginning of the Song Shulamith says "The King hath brought me into his 
chambers." This suggests a probability of legends having arisen concerning 
Abishag, and concerning the lady entreated in Psalm xlv., which, had they 
been preserved, might perhaps account for the coincidence of names, as well 
as the parallelism of the siti:ations at court of the lady of the psalm, of 
Abishag the Shunamith, and of Shulamith in the "song." 

The "great woman" called Shunamith in 2 Kings 4 was probably so 
called because of her "wisdom" in discerning the prophet Elisha, and the 
reference to the town of Shunem (verse 8) inserted by a writer who misunder- 
stood the meaning of Shunamith. This story is unknown to Josephus, 
though he tells the story of the widow's pot of oil immediately preceding, in 
the same chapter, and asserts that he has gone over the acts of Elisha " par- 
ticularly," " as we have them set down in the sacred books." {Antiquities . 
Book ix. ch. 4.) The chapter (2 Kings iv.) is mainly a mere travesty of the 
stories told in i Kings xvii., transparently meant to certify that the mir- 
aculous power of Elijah had passed with his mantle to Elisha. There is no 
mention of Shunem in the original legend. ( i Kings xvii. ) 



96 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

"There are threescore queens, and fourscore concubines, 
And maidens without number : 
Beyond compare is my dove, my unsoiled ; 
She is the only one of her mother, 
The cherished one of her that bare her : 
The daughters saw her and called her blessed, 
Yea, the queens and the concubines, and they praised her."* 

Thus far the motif seems to be that of a Cinderella 
oppressed by brothers but exalted by the most mag- 
nificent of princes. But here the plot changes. The 
magnificence of Solomon cannot allure from her shep- 
herd lover this ''lily of the valley." Her lover visits her 
in the palace, where her now relenting brothers (vi. 12) 
seem to appear (though this is doubtful) and witness 
her triumphs ; and all are in raptures at her dancing 
and her amply displayed charms — all unless one (per- 
haps the lover) who, according to a doubtful interpre- 
tation, complains that they should gaze at her as at 
dancers in the camps (vi. 13).** 

Although Russell Martineau maintained, against 
most other commentators, that Solomon is only a part 
of the scene, and not among the dramatis personce, the 
King certainly seems to be occasionally present, as in 
the following dialogue, where I give the probable, 
though of course conjectural, names. The dancer has 
approached the King while at table. 

Solomon — 

"I have compared thee, O my love. 

To my steed in Pharaoh's chariot. 

Thy cheeks are comely with plaits of hair, 

Thy neck with strings of jewels. 

* Compare Psalm xlv. 12-15. 

* * I. *' Why will ye look upon Shulamith as upon the dance of Mahan- 
aim?" The sense is obscure. Cf. Gen. xxxii. 2, where Jacob names a place 
Manhanaim, literally two armies or camps; but it was in honor of the angels 
that met him there, and it is possible that Shulamith is here compared to an 
angel. If the verse means any blush at the dancer's display of her person it 
is the only trace of prudery in the book, and betrays the Alexandrian. 



THE SONG OF SONGS. 97 

We will make thee plaits of gold 
With studs of silver." 

Shulamith, ivho, on leaving the King, meets her jealous lover — 
"While the King sat at his table 
My spikenard sent forth its odor. 
My beloved is unto me as a bag of myrrh 
That lieth between my breasts, 

My beloved is unto me as a cluster of henna-flowers 
In the vineyards of En-gedi." 

Shepherd Lover — 

"Behold thou art fair, my love, behold thou art fair; 
Thine eyes are as doves, 

Behold thou art fair, my beloved, yea pleasant : 
Also our couch is green. 
The beams of our house are of cedar, 
And our rafters are of fir." 

Shulamith — 

"I am a (mere) crocus of the plain." 

Chorus, or perhaps the Lover — 
"A lily of the valleys." 

Shepherd Lover — 

"As a lily among thorns 
So is my love among the daughters." 

Shulamith — 

"As the apple tree among forest trees 
So is my beloved among the sons. 
I sat down under his shadow with great delight, 
And his fruit was sweet to my taste." 

Thus we find the damsel anointing the king with her 
spikenard, but for her the precious fragrance is her 
shepherd. Against the plaits of gold and studs of silver 
offered in the palace (i. 2) her lover can only point to 
his cottage of cedar and fir, and a couch of grass. She 
is content to be only a flower of the plain and valley, 
not for the seraglio. Nevertheless she remains to 
dance in the palace; a sufficient time there is needed 



98 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

by the poet to illustrate the impregnability of true love 
against all other splendors and attractions, even those 
of the Flower of Kings. He however puts no constraint 
on her, one song, thrice repeated, saying to the ladies of 
the harem — 

"I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, 
By the (free) gazelles, by the hinds in the field, 
That ye stir not up, nor awaken love, 
Until it please." 

This refrain is repeated the second time just before 
a picture of Solomon's glory, shaded by a suggestion 
that all is not brightness even around this Prince of 
Peace. The ladies of the seraglio are summoned to 
look out and see the passing of the King in state, seated 
on his palanquin of purple and gold, but escorted by 
armed men ''because of fear in the night." In imme- 
diate contrast with that scene, we see Shulamith going 
off with her humble lover, now his bride, to his field and 
to her vineyard, and singing a beautiful song of love, 
strong as death, flame-tipped arrow of a god, unquench- 
able, unpurchaseable. 

Though according to the revised version of vi. 12 
her relatives are princely, and it may be they who invite 
her to return (vi. 13), she says, "I am my beloved's." 
With him she will go into the field and lodge in the 
village (vii. 10, 11). She finds her own little garden 
and does not envy Solomon. 

"Solomon hath a vineyard at Baalhamon; 
He hath let out the vineyard to keepers ; 
Each for the fruit thereof was to bring a thousand pieces 

of silver : 
My vineyard, which is mine, is before me : 
Thou, O Solomon, shall have the thousand, 
And those that keep the fruit thereof two hundred." 



THE SONG OF SONGS, 99 

There was, as we see in Koheleth, a prevailing tradi- 
tion that Solomon felt the hollowness of his palatial 
life. "See life with a woman thou lovest." The wife 
is the fountain : 

"Bethink thee of thy fountain 
In the days of thy youth," 

This perhaps gave rise to a theory that the shepherd 
lover was Solomon himself in disguise, like the god 
Krishna among the cow-maidens. It does not appear 
probable that any thought of that kind was in the writer 
of this Song. Certainly there appears not to be any 
purpose of lowering Solomon personally in enthroning 
Love above him. There is no hint of any religious or 
moral objection to him, and indeed throughout the work 
Solomon appears in a favourable light personally, — he 
is beloved by the daughters of Jerusalem (v. 10) — 
though his royal estate is, as we have seen, shown in a 
light not altogether enviable. Threescore mighty men 
guard him : ''every man hath his sword upon his thigh 
because of fear in the night," and the day of his heart's 
gladness was the day of his espousals (iii. 8, 11). 

It is not improbable that there is an allusion to Solo- 
mon's magic seal in the first lines of the hymn to Love 
(viii. 6). The legend of the Ring must have been long 
in growing to the form in which it is found in the 
Talmud, where it is said that Solomon's ''fear in the 
night" arose from his apprehension that the Devil might 
again get hold of his Ring, with which he (Aschmedai) 
once wrought much mischief. (Gittin. Vol. 68, col. 
I, 2). The hymm strikes me as late Alexandrian: 

"Wear me as a seal on thy breast 
As a seal-ring on thine arm : 
For love is strong as death, 



lOO SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

Its passion unappeasable as the grave; 

Its shafts are arrows of fire, 

The lightnings of a god. [Jah.] 

Many waters cannot quench love, 

Deluges cannot overwhelm it. 

Should a noble offer all the wealth of his house for love 

It would be utterly spurned." 

Excluding the interrupting verses 8 and 9, the hymn 
is followed by a song about Solomon's vineyard, pre- 
ceded by two lines which appear to me to possess a 
significance overlooked by commentators. Shulamith 
(evidently) speaks: 

"I was a wall, my breasts like its towers : 
Thus have I been in his eyes as one finding peace. 
Solomon hath a vineyard," etc. [as above.] 

The word ''peace" is Shalom; it is immediately fol- 
lowed by Shelomoh (Solomon, ''peaceful") ; and Shula- 
mith (also meaning "peaceful"), thus brings together 
the fortress of her lover's peace, her own breast, and 
the fortifications built by the peaceful King (who never 
attacked but was always prepared for defence). Here 
surely, at the close of Canticles, is a sort of tableau : 
Shalom, Shulamith, Shelomoh : Peace, the prince of 
Peace, the queen of Peace. If this were the only lyric 
one would surely infer that these were the bride and 
bridegroom, under the benediction of Peace. It is not 
improbable that at this climax of the poem Shulamith 
means that in her lover she has found her Solomon, 
and he found in her his Solomona, — their reciprocal 
strongholds of Shalom or Peace. 

Of course my interpretations of the Song of Songs 
are largely conjectural, as all other interpretations 
necessarily are. The songs are there to be somehow 
explained, and it is of importance that every unbiassed 



THE SONG OF SONGS. lOI 

student of the book should state his conjectures, these 
being based on the contents of the book, and not on the 
dogmatic theories which have been projected into it. 
I have been compelled, under the necessary limitations 
of an essay like the present, to omit interesting details 
in the work, but have endeavoured to convey the impres- 
sion left on my own mind by a totally unprejudiced 
study. The conviction has grown upon me with every 
step that, even at the lowest date ever assigned it, the 
work represents the earliest full expression of roman- 
tic love known in any language. It is so entirely free 
from fabulous, supernatural, or even pious incidents 
and accents, so human and realistic, that its having 
escaped the modern playwright can only be attributed 
to the superstitious encrustations by which its beauty 
has been concealed for many centuries. 

This process of perversion was begun by Jewish 
Jahvists, but they have been far surpassed by our A. S. 
version, whose solemn nonsense at most of the chapter 
heads in the Bible here reached its climax. It is a 
remarkable illustration of the depths of fatuity to 
which clerical minds may be brought by prepossession, 
that the closing chapter of Canticles, with its beautiful 
exaltation of romantic love, could be headed: ''The 
love of the Church to Christ. The vehemency of Love. 
The calling of the Gentiles. The Church Prayeth for 
Christ's coming." The "Higher Criticism" is now 
turning the headings into comedy, but they have done 
— nay, are continuing — their very serious work of 
misdirection. 

It has already been noted that the Jewish doctors 
exalted Bathsheba, adulteress as she was, into a blessed 
woman, probably because of the allusion to her in the 



I02 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

Song (iii. 2) as having crowned her royal Son, who 
had become mystical; and it can only be ascribed to 
Protestantism that, instead of the Queen-Mother Mary, 
the Church becomes Bathsheba's successor in our ver- 
sion: ''The Church glorieth in Christ." And of 
course the shepherd lover's feeding (his flock) among 
the lilies becomes ''Christ's care of the Church/' 

But for such fantasies the beautiful Song of Songs 
might indeed never have been preserved at all, yet is it 
a scandal that Bibles containing chapter-headings 
known by all educated Christians to be falsifications, 
should be circulated in every part of the world, and 
chiefly among ignorant and easily misled minds. 
These simple people, reading the anathemas pronounced 
in their Bibles on those who add anything to the book 
given them as the ''Word of God" (Deuteronomy iv. 2, 
xii. 32, Proverbs xxx. 6, Revelation xxii. 18), cannot 
imagine that these chapter-headings are not in the 
original books, but forged. And what can be more 
brazenly fraudulent than the chapter-heading to one 
of these very passages (Revelation xxii. 18, 19), where 
nothing is said of the "Word of God," but over which 
is printed: "18. Nothing may be added to the word 
of God, nor taken therefrom." But even the learned 
cannot quite escape the effect of these perversions. 
How far they reach is illustrated in the fate of Mary 
Magdalen, a perfectly innocent woman according to 
the New Testament, yet by a single chapter-heading in 
Luke branded for all time as the ''sinner" who anointed 
Jesus, — "Magdalen" being now in our dictionaries as a 
repentant prostitute. Yet there are hundreds of addi- 
tions to the Bible more harmful than this, — additions 
which, whether honestly made or not originally, are 



THE SONG OF SONGS. 103 

now notoriously fraudulent. It is especially necessary 
in the interest of the Solomonic and secular literature 
in the Bible that Truth shall be liberated from the mal- 
arious well — Jahvist and ecclesiastical — in which she 
has long been sunk by mistranslation, interpolation, 
and chapter-headings. The Christian churches are to 
be credited with having produced critics brave enough 
to expose most of these impositions, and it is now the 
manifest duty of all public teachers and literary lead- 
ers to uphold those scholars, to protest against the con- 
tinuance of the propaganda of pious frauds, and to 
insist upon the supremacy of truth. 



CHAPTER X. 

KOHELETH ( ECCLESIASTES ). 

In the Atlantic Monthly for February, 1897, a 
writer, in giving his personal reminiscences of Tenny- 
son, relates an anecdote concerning the poet and the 
Rev. F. D. Maurice. Speaking of Ecclesiastes (Kohe- 
leth), Tennyson said it was the one book the admission 
of which into the canon he could not understand, it was 
so utterly pessimistic — of the earth, earthy. Maurice 
fired up. **Yes, if you leave out the last two verses. 
But the conclusion of the whole matter is, 'Fear God 
and keep His commandments : for this is the whole duty 
of man. For God shall bring every work into judg- 
ment, with every secret thing, whether it be good or 
whether it be evil.' So long as you look only down 
upon earth, all is Vanity of vanities.' But if you look 
up there is a God, the judge of good and evil." Tenny- 
son said he would think over the matter from that point 
of view. 

This amusing incident must have caused a ripple of 
laughter in scholastic circles, now that the labors of 
Cheyne, Renan, Dillon, and others, have left little 
doubt that both of the verses cited by Maurice are later 
editorial additions. They alone, he admitted, could 
save the book, and the charm of the incident is that 
the verses were placed there by ancient Maurices to 
induce ancient Tennysons to ''think over the matter 
from that point of view." The result was that the 

104 



KOHELETH {ECCLESIASTES). 105 

previously rejected book was admitted into the canon 
by precisely the same force which continued its work 
at Faringford, and continues it to this day. Only one 
must not suppose that Mr. Maurice was aware of the 
ungenuineness of the verses. He was an honest gen- 
tleman, but so ingeniously mystical that had the two 
verses not been there he could readily have found others 
of equally transcendant and holy significance, without 
even resorting to other pious interpolations in the book. 

Tennyson was curiously unconscious of his own 
pessimism. When any one questioned the belief in a 
future life in his presence his vehemence without argu- 
ment betrayed his sub-conscious misgivings, while his 
indignation ran over all the conditional resentments of 
Job. I have heard that he said to Tyndall that if he 
knew there was no future life he would regard the 
creator of human beings as a demon, and shake his fist 
in His eternal face. This rage was based in a more 
profoundly pessimistic view of the present life than 
anything even in Ecclesiastes, — by which name may be 
happily distinguished the disordered, perverted, and 
mistranslated Koheleth. 

It appears evident that the sentence which opens 
Koheleth, — in our Bibles ''All is vanity, saith the 
Preacher ; vanity of vanities, all is vanity," — is as mere 
a Jahvist chapter-heading as that of our A. S. transla- 
tors : 'The Preacher showeth that all human courses 
are vain." It is repeated as the second of the eight 
verses added at the end of the work. Koheleth does 
not label the whole of things vanity; in a majority of 
cases the things he calls vain are vain ; and some things 
he finds not vanity, — youth, and wedded love, and 
work that is congenial. 



Io6 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

Renan (Histoire dii Peuple d' Israel, Tome 5, p. 158) 
has shown conchisively, as I think, that the signature 
on this book, QHLT, is a mere letter-play on the word 
"Solomon," and the eagerness with which the letters 
were turned into Koheleth ( which really means Preach- 
eress), and to make Solomon's inner spouse a preacher 
of the vanities of pleasure and the wisdom of fearing 
God, is thus naively indicated in the successive names 
of the book, ''Koheleth" and "Ecclesiastes." We are 
thus warned by the title to pick our way carefully where 
the Jahvist and the Ecclesiastic have been before us ; 
remembering especially that though piety may induce 
men to forge things, this is never done lightly. As peo- 
ple now do not commit forgery for a shilling, so neither 
did those who placed spurious sentences or phrases in 
nearly every chapter of the Bible do so for anything 
they did not consider vital to morality or to salvation. 
In Ecclesiastes we must be especially suspicious of the 
very serious religious points. Fortunately the style of 
the book renders it particularly subject to the critical 
and literary touchstone. 

Is it necessary to point out to any man of literary 
instinct the interpolation bracketed in the following 
verses? "Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth, and let 
thy heart gladden thee in the flower of thy age, and 
walk in the paths of thy heart, and according to the 
vision of thine eyes [but know thou that for all these 
things God will bring thee into judgment], and banish 
discontent from thy heart, and put away evil from thy 
flesh ; for youth and dawn are fleeting. Remember also 
thy fountain in the days of thy youth, or ever the 
evil days come or the years draw nigh in which thou 
shalt say I have no delight in them." 



KOHELETH {ECCLESIASTES). 107 

It is only by removing the bracketed clause that any 
consistency can be found in the lyric, which Professor 
Cheyne compares with the following song by the ancient 
Egyptian harper at the funeral feast of Neferhotap : 

"Make a good day, O holy fathers ! 
Let odors and oils stand before thy nostril ; 
Wreaths and lotus are on the arms and bosom of thy sister 
Dwelling in thy heart, sitting beside thee. 
Let song and music be before thy face, 
And leave behind thee all evil dirges ! 
Mind thee of joy, till cometh the day of pilgrimage, 
When we draw near the land that loveth silence."* 

There is no historical means of determining what 
writings of Solomon are preserved in the Bible and 
even in the apocryphal books. One may feel that 
Goethe recognised a brother spirit in thait far epoch 
when he selected for his proverb : 

"Apples of gold in chased work of silver, 
A word smoothly spoken." 

Koheleth too appreciated this, and also (x. 12) uses 
almost literaUy Proverbs xii. 18, "The tongue of the 
wise is gentleness." (Compare Shakespeare's words, 
**Let gentleness my strong enforcement be.") The 
lines previously cited, "Rejoice O young man, etc.," are 
also probably quoted, as they are given in poetical 
quatrains. There are many of these quatrains intro- 
duced into the book, from the prose context of which 
they differ in style and sometimes in sense. 

In none of these metrical quotations (as I believe 
them to be) is there any belief in God, the only instance 

* Job and Solomon, or ihe Wisdom of the Old Testament. By T. K. 
Cheyne. (1887.) Those who wish to study the Solomonic liteiature should 
read this excellent work. It is very probable, although Professor Cheyne 
does not suggest this, that a dramatic "Morality" from which Job was 
evolved, was imported by Solomon along with the'gold of Ophir from some 
Or:ental land. 



Io8 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

in which the word "God" is mentioned being an ironical 
maxim about the danger coming from monarchs be- 
cause of their oaths to their God, with whom they 
identify their own ways and wishes. Such seems to me 
the meaning of the lines (viii. 2, 4) which Dillon trans- 
lates — 

"The wise man barkens to the king's command, 
By reason of the oath to God. 
Mighty is the word of the monarch : 
Who dares ask him, 'What dost thou?' " 

With this compare Proverbs xxi. i, "The king's heart 
is in the hand of the Lord (Jahveh) as the water- 
courses ; he turneth it whithersoever he will." This 
proverb is evidently by a Jahvist, and Koheleth quotes 
another which signifies rather "Jahveh is in the king's 
caprice." But he adopts the neighbouring proverb, "To 
do justice and judgment is more acceptable to Jahveh 
than sacrifice." Koheleth says, and this is not quoted — 
"To draw near to (God) in order to learn, is better 
than the offering of sacrifices by fools." 

Although the verses quoted by Maurice to Tennyson 
(xii. 13, 14) are not genuinely in Koheleth they corre- 
spond with sentences in the genuine text of very dif- 
ferent import. Koheleth, though his quotations are 
godless, believes there is a God, and a formidable one. 
Sometimes he refers to him as Fate, sometimes as the 
unknowable, but as without moral quality. "To the 
just men that happeneth which should befall wrong- 
doers ; and that happeneth for criminals which should be 
the lot of the upright" (viii. 14), and "neither (God's) 
love nor hatred doth a man foresee" (ix. i). God has 
set prosperity and adversity side by side for the express 



KOHELETH {ECCLESIASTES). 109 

purpose of hiding Himself from human knowledge (vii. 
14) ; not, alas, as the Yalkut Koheleth suggests, in order 
that one may help the other. God does benefit those 
who please him, and punish those who displease him ; 
this is 'good' and 'evil' to Him; but it has no relation 
with the humanly good and evil (viii. 11-14). As it 
is evident that God's favor is not secured by good works 
nor his disfavor incurred by evil works, a prudent man 
will consider that it may perhaps be a matter of eti- 
quette, and will be punctilious, especially "in the house 
of God" ; he will not speak rashly and then hope to 
escape by saying "it was rashness." His words had 
better be few, and if he makes any vow (which may 
well be avoided) he should perform it. But as for 
practical life and conduct, God, or fate, is clearly in- 
different to it, consequently let a man eat his bread and 
quaff his wine with joy, love his wife, — the best portion 
of his lot, — and whatever his hand findeth to do that do 
with vigor, remembering that "there is no work, nor 
thought, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the inevitable 
grave." 

Such is Koheleth's conception of life, which, except 
so far as it is marred by a vague notion of Fate which 
is fatal to philanthropy, is not very different from the 
idea growing in our own time. "The All is a never- 
ceasing whirl" (i. 8), and Koheleth advises that each 
individual man try to make what little circle of happi- 
ness he can around him. "O my heart!" says Omar 
Khayyam, "thou wilt never penetrate the mysteries of 
the heavens; thou wilt never reach that culminating 
point of wisdom which the intrepid omniscients have 
attained. Resign thyself then to make what little para- 



no SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

dise thou canst here below. As for that close-barred 
seraglio beyond thou shalt arrive there — or thou shalt 
not!" 

It is, however, impossible for any church or priest- 
hood to be maintained on any such principles. Where 
mankind believe with Koheleth that whatever God does 
is forever, that nothing can be superadded to it nor 
aught be taken away; and that God has so contrived 
that man must fear Him ; they will have no use for any 
paraphernalia for softening the irrevocable decrees of 
a Judgment Day already past. But Koheleth's arrows, 
feathered with wit and eloquence, were logically shot 
from the Jahvist arquebus. It was Jahveh himself who 
proudly claimed that he created good and evil, and that 
if there were evil in a city it was his work. It was 
Jahveh's own prophet, Isaiah, who cried (Ixiii. 17), 
"O Lord, why dost Thou make us to err from Thy 
ways, and hardenest our heart from Thy fear?" 

What then could Jahvism say when a time arrived 
wherein it must defend itself against a Jahveh-created 
world ? 



CHAPTER XL 

WISDOM ( ECCLESIASTICUS ). 

It was necessary that Koheleth should be answered, 
but who was competent for this? A fable had been 
invented of a Solomonic serpent who had tempted Eve 
to taste the fruit of knowledge which, when the man 
shared it, brought a curse on the earth, but the canon- 
ical prophets do not appear to have heard of it, and at 
any rate it was too late in the day to meet fact with 
fable. Nor had Jahveh's whirlwind-answer to Job 
proved effectual. However, some sort of answer did 
come, and significantly enough it had to come from 
Koheleth's own quarter, the Wisdom school. Pure 
Jahvism had not brains enough for the task. 

The apocryphal book "Ecclesiasticus" is the antidote 
to Ecclesiastes. (These are the Christian names given 
to the two books.) This book, bearing the simple title 
'Wisdom," compiled and partly written by Jesus Ben 
Sira early in the second century B. C, is as a whole 
much more than an offset to Koheleth. It is a great 
though unintentional literary monument to Solomon, 
and it is the book of reconciliation, or so intended, 
between Solomonism and Jahvism, — or, as we should 
now say, between philosophy and theology. 

The newly discovered original Hebrew of Ecclesias- 
tlcus xxxix. 15, xlix. 11, published by the Claren- 
don Press In 1897, enables us to read correctlv for the 

III 



112 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

first time the portraiture of Solomon in xlvii., with the 
assistance of Wace and other scholars : 

12. After him [David] rose up a wise son, and for his 
[David's] sake he dwelt in quiet. 

13. Solomon reigned in days of prosperity, and was 
honoured, and God gave rest to him round about that he might 
build an house in his name, and prepare his sanctuary for ever. 

14. How wast thou wise in thy youth, and didst overflow 
with instruction Uke the Nile ! 

15. The earth (was covered by thy soul) and thou didst 
celebrate song in the height. 

16. Thy name went far unto the islands, and for thy peace 
thou wast beloved. 

17. The countries marvelled at thee for thy songs, and 
proverbs, and parables, and interpretations. 

18. Thou wast called by the glorious name which is called 
over Israel. 

i8a. Thou didst gather gold as tin, and didst gather silver as 
lead. 

19. But thou gavest thy loins unto women, and lettest them 
have dominion over thy body. 

20. Thou didst stain thy honour and pollute thy seed; so 
that thou broughtest wrath upon thy children, that they should 
groan in their beds. 

21. That the kingdom should be divided : and out of 
Ephraim ruled a rebel kingdom. 

22. But the Lord will never leave off his mercy, neither 
shall any of his words perish, neither will he abolish the poster- 
ity of his elect, and the seed of him that loveth him he will 
not take away: wherefore he gave a remnant unto Jacob, and 
out of him a root unto David. 

23. Thus rested Solomon with his fathers, and of his seed 
he left behind him Rehoboam [of the lineage of Ammon], 
ample in foolishness and lacking understanding, who by his 
council let loose the people. 

In the last sentence I have inserted in crochets an 
alternative reading of Fritzsche for the three words 



WISDOM {ECCLESTASTICUS). 1 13 

that follow. (Rehoboam's Ammonite mother was 
Naamah.) 

It will be noticed that early in the second century 
B. C. there remained no trace of the anathemas on Solo- 
mon for his foreign or his idolatrous wives. He is now 
simply accused of being too fond of women, — a charge 
not known to the canonical books. 

The verse 18 attests the correctness of the view 
taken of the forty-fifth Psalm in chapter III., writ- 
ten before this Clarendon Press volume appeared. It 
thus becomes certain that the Psalm was recognised as 
written in Solomon's time, and that it was he who was 
there addressed as "God" ("the glorious name"). 

The mention of this fact in "Wisdom," and the 
enthusiasm pervading every sentence of the tribute to 
Solomon, despite his alleged sensuality, supply con- 
clusive evidence that the cult of Solomon had for more 
than eight centuries been continuous, that it was at 
length prevailing, and that it had become necessary for 
a broad wing of Jahvism to include the Solomonic 
worldly wisdom and ethics. 

Jesus Ben Sira states that he found a book written by 
his learned grandfather, whose name was also Jesus, 
who had studied many works of "our fathers," and 
added to them writings of his own. The anonymous 
preface states that Sira, son of the first Jesus, left it to 
his son, and that "this Jesus did imitate Solomon." 

It is not said that Sira contributed anything to this 
composite work, yet there appear to be three minds in 
it. There is a fine and free philosophy which savors 
of the earliest traditions of the Solomonic School ; there 
is an exceptionally morose Jahvism ; and there is also 



114 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

mysticism, an attempt to rationalise and soften the 
Jahvism, and to solemnise the philosophy, so as to blend 
them in a kind of harmonious religion. I cannot help 
feeling that Sira or some friend of his must have in- 
serted the Jahvism between the grandfather and the 
grandson. 

However this may be, it is evident that Jesus Ben 
Sira was too reverent to seriously alter anything in the 
volume before him, for the contrast is startling between 
the hard Jahvism and the philosophy of life. Their 
inclusion in one work is like the union of oil and vine- 
gar. The Jahvism is curiously bald : fear Jahveh, keep 
his commandments, pay your tithes, say your prayers, 
be severe with your children (especially daughters), 
never play with them, guard your wife vigilantly, flog 
your servants. The philosophy is quite incongruous 
with this formalism and rigidity, most of the maxims 
being elaborated with care, and only proverbs in form. 
Some of them are almost Shakespearian in artistic 
expression : 

"Pipe and harp make sweet the song, but a sincere tongue 
is above them both." 

"Wisdom hid, and treasure hoarded, what value is in 
either?" 

"The fool's heart is in his mouth, the wise man's mouth is 
in his heart." 

"There is no riches above a sound body, and no joy above 
that of the heart." 

"Whoso regardeth dreams is as one who grasps at his 
shadow." 

"The evil man cursing Satan is but cursing himself." 

"The bars of Wisdom shall be thy fortress, her chains thy 
robe of honour." 

About the rendering of xli. 15 there is some doubt, 
and I give this conjecture : 



WISDOM {ECCLESIASTICUS). 115 

Better the (ignorant) that hideth his folly, than the 
(learned) who hideth his wisdom. 

In the Bible which belonged to the historian Gibbon, 
loaned by the late General Meredith Read to the Gib- 
bon exhibition in London, I observed a pencil mark 
around these sentences in "Wisdom" : 

"He that buildeth his house with other men's money, is like 
one that gathereth stones for the tomb of his own burial." 

"He that is not wise will not be taught, but there is a wis- 
dom that multiplieth bitterness." 

To Jesus Ben Sira we may, I believe, ascribe the 
following : 

"Glorifying God, exalt him as far as your thought can reach, 
yet you will never attain to his height : praising him, put forth 
all your powers, be not weary, yet ever will they fall short. 
Who hath seen him that he can tell us ? Who can describe him 
as he is? Let us still be rejoicing in him, for we shall not 
search him out: he is great beyond his works." 

This has an interesting correspondence with the 
beautiful rapture of the Persian Sadi : 

"They who pretend to be informed are ignorant, for they 
who have known him have not recovered their senses. O thou 
who towerest above the heights of imagination, thought, or 
conjecture, surpassing all that has been related, and excelling 
all that we have heard or read, the banquet is ended, the con- 
gregation is dismissed, and life draws to a close, and we still 
rest in our first encomium of thee!" 

To Jesus Ben Sira may be safely ascribed the pas- 
sages that bear witness to the pressure of problems 
which, though old, appear in new forms under Hellenic 
infliiences. They grow urgent and threaten the foun- 
dations of Jahvism. It was no longer sufficient to say 
that Jahveh rewarded virtue and piety, and punished 
vice and impiety in this world. Job had demanded the 



Il6 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

evidence for this, and the centuries had brought none. 
Job was awarded some recompense in this world, but 
that happy experience did not attend other virtuous suf- 
ferers. 

The doctrine of one writer in "Wisdom" is simply 
predestination. Paul's potter-and-clay similitude is an- 
ticipated, and the Parsi dualism curiously adapted to 
Jahvist monotheism: "Good is set against evil, life 
against death, the godly against the sinner and the sin- 
ner against the godly : look through all the works of the 
Most High and there are two and two, one against 
another." But the liberal son of Sira is more optimist : 
"All things are double, one against another, but he 
hath made nothing imperfect : one thing establisheth 
the good of another." Freedom of the will is asserted : 
"Say not, he hath caused me to err, for he hath no need 
of the evildoer. He made man from the beginning and 

left him in the hand of his (own) counsel 

He hath set fire and water before thee, stretch forth 
thy hand to whichever thou wilt. Before man is the 
living and the not-living, and whichever he liketh shall 
be given him." 

But the doctrine of human free agency is pregnant 
with polemics ; it has so been in Christian history, as is 
proved by the Pelagian, Arminian, Jesuit, and Wes- 
leyan movements. There are indications in Ben Sira's 
work that the foundations of Jahvism were threatened 
by a moral scepticism. His own celebration of the 
Fathers was enough to bring into dreary contrast the 
tragedies of his own time and glories of the Past, when 
"Judah and Israel dwelt safely, every man under his 
vine and fig-tree, from Dan even to Beer-sheba, all the 
days of Solomon." What shelter now in the divine 



WISDOM {ECCLESIASTIC US). II7 

fig-tree, which could bear nothing but legendary or pre- 
dictive leaves ? The curse on the barren tree was near 
at hand when Jesus Ben Sira uttered his pathetic com- 
plaint, veiled in prayer : 

"Have mercy on us, O Lord God of all, and regard us ! 
Send thy fear on all the nations that seek thee not ; lift thy 
hand against them, let them see thy power ! As thou wast 
(of old) sanctified in us before them, be thou (now) magnified 
among them before us ; and let them know thee, as we have 
known thee, — that there is, O God, no God but thou alone! 
Show new signs, more strange wonders ; glorify thy hand and 
thy right arm, that they may publish thy wondrous works ! 
Raise up indignation, pour out wrath, remove the adversary, 
destroy the enemy : hasten ! remember thy covenant, and let 
them witness thy wonderful works!" 



CHAPTER XII. 

THE WISDOM OF SOLOMON. 

Somewhat more than a century after Jesus Ben 
Sira's work, came an answer to his prayer, not from 
above but from beneath, in the so-called "Psalter of 
Solomon." This is no wisdom book, and need not 
detain us. It is mainly a hash — one may say a mess — 
made up out of the Psalms; and though some of the 
allusions, apparently to Pompey and others, may possess 
value in other connexions, thiC work need only be 
mentioned here as an indication of the fate which Solo- 
mon met at the hands of Jahvism. The name of the 
Wisest of his race on this vulgar production is like the 
doggerel on Shakespeare's tomb, and the fling at Eng- 
land's greatest poet written on the tomb of his daugh- 
ter, — ''Wise to salvation was good Mistriss Hall," etc. 

Before passing, it may be remarked that the obvious 
allusions to Christ in this Psalter seem clearly spurious, 
and for one I cannot regard as other than a late inter- 
polation verse 24 of Psalter-Psalm xvii. : "Behold, O 
God, and raise up unto them their king, the Son of 
David, in the time which thou, O God, knowest, that he 
may reign over Israel thy servant." There is nothing 
in the literature of the time before or after that would 
warrant the concession to this ranting Salvationist 
(B. C. 70-60) of an idea which would then have been 
original. The verse has the accent of a Second Ad- 

118 



THE WISDOM OF SOLOMON. 119 

ventist a century later. The title ''Son of David" oc- 
curs even in the New Testament but sixteen times. 

The Psalter is in spirit thoroughly Jahvist, narrow, 
hard, without one ray of Solomonic wisdom or wit. It 
may fairly be regarded as the sepulchre of the wise man 
whose name it bears (though not in its text). Jahvism 
has here triumphed over the whole cult of Wisdom. 

But Solomon is not to rest there. He is again 
evoked, though not yet in his ancient secular greatness, 
by the next work that claims our attention. 

This last of the Wisdom Books bears the heading 
''Wisdom of Solomon" (Sophia Solomontos) and gives 
unmistakable identifications of the King, though herein 
also the name "Solomon" appears only in the title. 
Perhaps the writer may have wished to avoid ex- 
citing the ridicule or resentment of the Solomonists 
by plainly connecting the name of their founder with a 
retractation of all the secularism and the heresies 
anciently associated with him. The aristocratic Sad- 
ducees, who believed not in immortality, derived their 
name from Solomon's famous chaplain, Zadok. 

This "Wisdom of Solomon" probably appeared not 
far from the first year of our era. It is written in 
almost classical Greek, is full of striking and poetic 
interpretations and spiritualisations of Jewish legends, 
and transfused with a piety at once warm and mystical. 
Solomon is summoned much in the way that the "Wan- 
dering Jew," Ahasuerus, is called up in Shelley's 
"Prometheus," yet not quite allegorically, to testify con- 
cerning the Past, and concerning the mysteries of the 
invisible world. He has left behind his secularist Prov- 
erbs and his worldly wisdom ; but though he now rises 
as a prophet of otherworldliness, not a word is uttered 



I20 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

inconsistent with his having been a saint from the be- 
ginning, albeit "chastised" and ''proved." In fact he 
gives his spiritual autobiography, which is that of a 
Son of God wise and ''undefiled" from childhood. His 
burden is to warn the kings and judges of the world of 
the blessedness that awaits the righteous, — the misery 
that awaits the unrighteous, — ^beyond the grave. 

The work impresses me as having been written by 
one who had long been an enthusiastic Solomonist, but 
who had been spiritually revolutionised by attaining the 
new belief of immortality. It does not appear as if the 
apparition of Solomon was to this v/riter a simple im- 
agination. Solomon seems to be alive, or rather as if 
never dead. "For thou (God) hast power of life and 
death : thou leadest to the gates of Hades, and bringest 
up again." "The giving heed unto her (Wisdom's) 
laws is the assurance of incorruption ; and incorruption 
maketh us near unto God : therefore the desire of Wis- 
dom bringeth to a Kingdom." 

The Jewish people idealised Solomon's reign long 
before they idealised the man himself; and indeed he 
had to reach his halo under personified epithets derived 
from his fame, — as "Melchizedek," and "Prince of 
Peace." The nation sighed for the restoration of his 
splendid empire, but could not describe their Coming 
Man as a returning Solomon, because the priests and 
prophets, — a gentry little respected by the Wise Man, — 
steadily ascribed all the national misfortunes to the 
shrines built to other deities than Jahveh by the royal 
Citizen of the World. Thus grew such prophetic in- 
directions as "the House of David," "Jesse's branch," 
and finally "Son of David." 

But this idea of the returning hero does not appear 



THE WISDOM OF SOLOMON. 121 

to have been original with any Semitic people ; it is first 
found among them in the Oriental book of Job, who 
longs to sleep in some cavern for ages, then reappear, 
and, even if his flesh were shrivelled, find that his good 
name was vindicated (xiv.) . This idea of the Sleeping 
Hero (which is traced in many examples in my work 
on The Wandering Jew) appears to have gained its 
earliest expression in the legend of King Yima, in 
Persia, — the original of such sleepers as Barbarossa and 
King Arthur, as well as of the legendary Enoch, Moses, 
and Elias, who were to precede or attend the revived 
Son of David. Solomon, whose name probably gave 
Jerusalem the peaceful half of its name (Salem) would 
no doubt have been central among the "Undying Ones" 
had it not been for the Parliament of Religions he set 
up in that city. But he had to wait a thousand years for 
his honorable fame to awaken. 

In the ''Wisdom of Solomon" the Queen of Sheba is 
also recalled into life. She is, as Renan pointed out, 
transfigured in the personified Wisdom, and her gifts 
become mystical. "All good things together came to 
me with her," and Wisdom goeth before them : and I 
knew not that she was the mother of them," She is 
amiable, beautiful, and gave him his knowledge : 

"All such things as are secret or manifest, them I 
knew. For Wisdom, which is the worker of all things, 
taught me : for in her is an understanding spirit, holy, 
one only, manifold ; subtle, lively, clear, undefiled, plain, 
not subject to hurt, loving the thing that is good, quick, 
which cannot be letted, ready to do good, kind to man, 
steadfast, sure, free from care, having all power, over- 
seeing all things, and pervading all intellectual, pure, 
and most subtle spirits. For Wisdom is more moving 



122 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

than motion itself; she passeth and goeth through all 
things by reason of her pureness. For she is the breath 
of the power of God, and a pure influence flowing from 
the glory of the Almighty : therefore can no impure 
thing fall into her. For she is the brightness of the 
everlasting light, the unspotted mirror of the power of 
God, and the image of his goodness. And alone, she 
can do all things; herself unchanged, she maketh all 
things new ; and in all ages, entering into holy souls, 
she maketh them intimates of God, and prophets. For 
God loveth only him who dwelleth with Wisdom. She 
is more beautiful than the sun, and above all the order of 
stars ; compared with the light she is found before it, — 
for after light cometh night, but evil shall not prevail 
against Wisdom." (vii. 21-30.) 

In Sophia Solomontos Solomon relates his espousal 
of Wisdom, who sat beside the throne of God (ix. 4). 
But there remains with God a detective Wisdom called 
the Holy Spirit. Wisdom and the Holy Spirit have 
different functions. "Thy counsel who hath known 
except thou give Wisdom, and send thy Holy Spirit 
from above?" This verse (ix. 17) is followed by two 
chapters (x., xi.) relating the work of Wisdom through 
past ages as a Saviour. But then comes an account of 
the severe chastening functions of the Holy Spirit. 
''For thine incorruptible Spirit is in all things (i. e., 
nothing is concealed from her), therefore chastenest 
thou them by little and little that offend," etc. 
(xii. I, 2.) 

There is here a slight variation in the historic devel- 
opment of the Spirit of God, and one so pregnant with 
results that it may be well to refer to some of the earlier 



THE WISDOM OF SOLOMON. 1 23 

Hebrew conceptions. The Spirit of God described in 
Genesis i. 2, as "brooding" over the waters was evi- 
dently meant to represent a detached agent of the deity. 
The legend is obviously related to that of the dove 
going forth over the waters of the deluge. The dove 
probably acquired its symbolical character as a messen- 
ger between earth and heaven from the marvellous 
powers of the carrier pigeon — powers well known in 
ancient Egypt — it also appears that its cooing was be- 
lieved to be an echo on earth of the voice of God.* We 
have already seen (viii.) that Wisdom, when first per- 
sonified, was identified with this ''brooding" spirit over 
the surface of the waters, and also that in a second 
(Jahvist) personification she is a severe and reproving 
agent. But in the second verse of Genesis there is a 
darkness on the abyss, and both darkness and abyss 
were personified. In the rigid development of mono- 
theism all of these beings were necessarily regarded as 
agents of Jahveh — monopolist of all powers. We thus 
find such accounts as that in i Samuel 16, where the 
Spirit of Jahveh departed from Saul and an evil Spirit 
from Jahveh troubled him. 

Although the Spirit of God was generally supposed 
to convey miraculous knowledge, especially of future 
events, and superior skill, it is not, I believe, in any 
book earlier than Sophia Solomonfos definitely ascribed 
the function of a detective. There is in Ecclesiastes 
(x. 20) a passage which suggests the carrier: "Curse 
not the King, no, not in thy thought ; and curse not the 
rich even in thy bedchamber ; for a bird of the air shall 
carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the 

* Bath Kol, — " daughter of a voice." 



124 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

matter."* This was evidently in the mind of the writer 
of Sophia Solomontos in the following verses : 

Wisdom is a loving Spirit, and will not (cannot?) 
acquit a blasphemer of his words : for God is a witness, 
of his reins, and a true beholder of his heart, and a 
hearer of his tongue ; for the Spirit of the Lord filleth 
the world, and that which containeth all things hath 
knowledge of the voice; therefore he that speaketh 
unrighteous things cannot be hid, neither shall venge- 
ance when it punisheth, pass by him. For inquisition 
shall be made into the counsels of the ungodly; the 
sound of his words shall come unto the Lord for the 
disclosure of his v\rickedness, the ear of jealousy heareth 
all things, and the sound even of murmurings is not 
secret." 

Here we have the origin of the "unpardonable sin." 
The Holy Spirit detects and informs, Jahveh avenges, 
and if the offence is blasphemy, Wisdom, the Saviour, 
cannot acquit (as the "Loving Spirit" of God it is for 
her ultra vires). This detective Holy Spirit appears 
to be an evolution from both Wisdom and Satan the 
Accuser, in Job a Son of God. By associating with 
Solomon on earth. Wisdom was without the severe 
holiness essential to Jahvist conceptions of divine gov- 
ernment; in other words, personified Wisdom, Vv^hose 
"delight was with the sons of men" (Prov. viii. 31) 
w^as too humanized to fulfil the conditions necessary for 
upholding the temple at a time when penal sanctions 
were withdrawn from the priesthood. A celestial spy 
was needed, and also an uncomfortable Sheol, if the 
ancient ordinances and sacrifices were to be preserved 

*This may, however, have been flotsam from the Orient. Mahanshadha, 
a sort of Solomon in Buddhist tales (see ante chap ii), had a wonderful par- 
rot, Charaka, which he employed as a spy. It revealed to him the plot to 
poison King Janaka, whose chief Minister he was. {^Tibetan Tales, p. i68.) 



THE WISDOM OF SOLOMON. 125 

at all under the rule of Roman liberty, and amid the 
cosmopolitan conditions prevailing at Jerusalem, and 
still more at Alexandria.* 

With regard to Wisdom herself, there is a sentence 
which requires notice, especially as no unweighed word 
is written in the work under notice. It is said, "In 
that she is conversant with God, she magnifieth her 
nobility ; yea, the Lord of all things himself loved her." 
(viii. 3).t This seems to be the germ of Philo's idea 
of Wisdom as the Mother: *'And she, receiving the 
seed of God, with beautiful birth-pangs brought forth 
this world, His visible Son, only and well-beloved." 
The writer of Sophia Solomontos is very careful to be 
vague in speculations of this kind, while suggesting 
inferences with regard to them. Thus, alluding to 
Moses before Pharaoh, he says, *'She (Wisdom) en- 
tered into the servant of the Lord, and withstood dread- 
ful kings in wonders and signs" (x. 16), but leaves us 
to mere conjecture as to whether he (the writer) still 
had Wisdom in mind when writing (xvii. 13) of the 
failure of these enchantments and the descent of the 
Almighty W^ord, for the destruction of the first-born: 

*'For while all things are quiet silence, and that night 
was in the midst of her swift course, thine Almighty 
Word leaped down from Heaven out of thy Royal 
throne, as a fierce man of war into the midst of a land 

* M. Didron {Christian Iconography, Bohn's ed., i., p. 464) mentions a 
picture of the thirteenth century in which the dove moving over the face of 
the waters (Gen. i) is black, God not having yet created light. It may be, how- 
ever, that the mediaeval idea was that the Holy Ghost, as a heavenly spy, was 
supposed to assume the color of the night in order to detect the deeds done 
in darkness without itself being seen. In later centuries this dark dove was 
shown at the ear of magicians and idols, the inspirer of prophets and saints 
being the white dove. 

t The amorous relations between Ahuramazda, the deity, and Armaiti, 
ffeniusof the earth, are referred to ante Chap. VIII., in a passage from 
West's Palahvi Texts. In the Vendidad she is sometimes called his 
daughter. 



126 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

of destruction; and brought thine unfeigned com- 
mandment as a sharp sword, and standing up filled all 
things with death; and it touched the heaven, but it 
stood upon the earth."* 

The Word in this place ( o Ttavrobmaiioi: gou Xoyoq ) is 
clearly reproduced in the Epistle to the Hebrews 
(iv. 12). "The Word of God is living, and active, and 
sharper than any two-edged sword ;" and the same mili- 
tary metaphor accompanies this ''Word" into Revela- 
tion xix. 13. This continuity of metaphor has appar- 
ently been overlooked by Alford {Greek Testament, 
vol. iv., p. 226) who regards the use of the phrase 
"Word of God" ( o loyoz rod 0£od ) as linking Revela- 
tion to the author of the fourth Gospel, whereas in this 
Gospel Logos is never followed by "of God," while it is 
so followed in Hebrews iv. 12. 

This evolution of the "Word" is clear. In the "Wis- 
dom of Solomon" Wisdom is the creative Word and the 
Saviour. The Word leaping down from the divine 
throne and bearing the sword of vengeance is more 
like the son of the celestial counterpart of Wisdom, 
namely, the detective Holy Spirit (called in i, 5 "the 
Holy Spirit of Discipline"). But in the era we are 
studying, all words by able writers were living things, 
and were two-edged swords, and long after they who 
wrote them were dead went on with active and sunder- 
ing work undreamed of by those who first uttered them. 

The Zoroastrian elements w^hich we rem^arked in 
Jesus Ben Sira's "Wisdom" are even more pronounced 
in the "Wisdom of Solomon." The Persian worship- 
pers are so mildly rebuked (xiii.) for not passing 

* Cf. Gospel of Peter: "They behold three men coming out of the 
tomb, and the two supporting the one, and the cross following them, and the 
heads of the two reached to the heavens, and that of him who was being led 
went above the heavens." 



THE WISDOM OF SOLOMON. 1 27 

beyond fire and star to the ''origin of beauty," that one 
may suppose the author, probably an Alexandrian, 
must have had friends among them. At any rate his 
conception of a resplendent God is Mazdean, his all- 
seeing Holy Spirit is the Parsi "Anahita," and his 
Wisdom is Armaiti, the ''loving spirit" on earth, the 
saviour of men.* The opposing kingdoms of Ahura- 
mazda and Angromainyu, and especially Zoroaster's 
original division of the universe into "the living and the 
not-living," are reflected in the "Wisdom of Solomon," 
i. 13-16: 

"God made not death : neither hath he pleasure in the 
destruction of the living. He created all things that 
they might have their being; and the generations of 
the world were healthful; and there (was) no poison 
of destruction in them, nor (any) kingdom of death on 
the earth : (for righteousness is immortal) : but ungodly 
men with their deeds and words evoked Death to them : 
when they thought to have it their friend they con- 
sumed to naught, and made a covenant with Death, 
being fit to take sides with it." 

In the moral and religious evolution which we have 
been tracing it has been seen that the utter indifference 
of the Cosmos to human good and evil, right and wrong, 
was the theme of Job ; that in Ecclesiastes the same 
was again declared, and the suggestion made that if God 
helped or afflicted men it must depend on some point 
of etiquette or observance unconnected with moral con- 

* Invoke, O Zoroaster, the powerful Spirit ( Wind ) formed by Mazda 
(Light) and Spenta Armaiti (earth-mother), the fair daughter of Ahura- 
mazda. Invoke, O Zoroaster, my Fravashi (deathless past), who am Ahu- 
ramazda, greatest, fairest, most solid, most intelligent, best shapen, highest 
in purity, whose soul is the holy Word. 

"Invoke Mithra (descending light), the lord of wide pastures, a god 
armed with beautiful weapons, with the most glorious of all weapons, vviih 
the most fiend-smiting of all weapons. 

" Invoke the most holy glorious word." — Zendavesia. (Vend. Farg. 
.xix. 2) 



128 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

siderations, so that man need not omit pleasure but only 
be punctilious when in the temple ; that in Jesus Ben 
Sira's contribution to his fathers' "Wisdom," the 
moral character of God was maintained, moral evil 
regarded as hostile to God, and imaginary sanctions 
invented, accompanied by pleadings with God to indorse 
them by new signs and wonders. Such signs not 
appearing, and no rewards and punishments being 
manifested in human life, the next step was to assign 
them to a future existence, and this step was taken in 
"Wisdom of Solomon." There remained but one more 
necessity, namely, that there should be some actual evi- 
dence of that future existence. Agur's question had 
remained unanswered — 

"Who has ascended into heaven and come down again? 
Such an one would I question about God." 

To this the reply was to be the resurrection from 
death claimed for the greatest of the spiritual race of 
Solomon. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS (A SEQUEL TO 
SOPHIA SOLOMONTOS). 

In a Theocracy the birth of a new God was not the 
mere new generalization that it might be in our secular- 
ized century, — a deification of the Unknowable, for in- 
stance, — of not the slightest practical or moral interest 
to any human being. Judea was the bodily incarna- 
tion, even more than Islam is now, of a deity who said, 
"I am the Lord and there is none else; I form the 
light and create darkness ; I make peace, and create 
evil; I the Lord do all these things." The denial of 
such a deity, the substitution of one who required 
neither prayers, sacrifices, nor intercessions, could not 
be merely theoretical. It must involve the overthrow 
of a nationality which had no bond of unity except a 
book, and the institutions founded on that book. 

Nor did the theocratic principle admit of a mere 
philosophical opposition to its institutions. He who 
touched that system was dealing with people who, in 
the language of "Sophia Solomontos" were "shut up 
in a prison without iron bars." The natural advent 
of the anti-Jahvist was in the Temple and with the 
words — 

He hath sent me to herald glad news to the poor, 
He hath sent me to proclaim deliverance to captives. 
And recovering of sight to the blind, 
To set at liberty them that are bruised. 

129 



130 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

These miseries had no real relation to the social or 
political conditions amid which their phrases and 
hymns were born, but to a burden of debts to a jealous 
and vindictive omnipotence; a burden not of actions 
really wrong, but of mysterious offences, related to 
incomprehensible ordinances and heavenly etiquette. 
No human vices are so malignant as inhuman virtues. 
Bunyan, in depicting Christian's burden, has, with 
a felicity perhaps unconscious, made it a pack strapped 
on. It is not a hunch, not any part of the pilgrim, 
and had he possessed the courage to examine it there 
must have been found many spiritual nightmares of 
the race, and many robust English virtues turned to 
sins Vv^hen the merry and honest tinker turned retro- 
spective Rip Van Winkle, and dreamed himself back 
into the year One. The burden of sins on the poor 
Israelites had been gradually getting lighter under the 
scepticism of the Wisdom school, in view of the failure 
of Jahveh to fulfil the menaces and sentences of the 
priesthood. Conformity was secured mainly for actual 
advantages bestowed by the synagogue, or its terrors. 
But the discovery of the doctrine of a future life and a 
day of judgment, wh'en all the mysterious "sins" were 
to be settled for, while smiled at by the Saducees, made 
the burden of the ignorant poor intolerable. Life was 
passed under suspended swords. The priesthood had 
a cowering vassal in every ignorant human being. 
The time, the labour, the flocks of the peasantry were 
devoted, but it was all a ''sweating" process, — the debts 
were never paid, and there was always that "certain 
fearful expectation of judgment, and a fierceness of 
fire which shall devour the adversaries." No doubt 



EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS. 13I 

even the learned supposed these superstitions useful to 
keep the "masses" in order. 

But one day a scholarly gentleman, a man of genius, 
was moved with compassion for these poor lost and 
priest-harried sheep: he turned aside from his college 
and his rank, and became their shepherd ; he declared 
they owed no duties to any deity, and that the heavenly 
despot they so dreaded had no existence. 

A modern gentleman in a fine mansion and estate 
may be amused at Bunyan's quaint pilgrim, reading 
in a book and discovering that he was in a City of 
Destruction, fleeing with a burden on his back, and 
rejoicing when it rolls off at the cross. But if this 
gentleman should suddenly receive from some distant 
personage papers showing that his estate had been 
entirely mortgaged by his father, that it would soon be 
claimed and his family reduced to beggary, he might 
understand the City of Destruction. And if, soon after, 
some visitor arrived to state that the holder of the 
mortgages was dead ; that those claims had all legally 
fallen into his own hands, and that he had burnt them, 
the rolling off of Christian's burden might be appre- 
ciated, — also the enthusiasm of the personal followers 
of Jesus. 

But one might further imagine a host of hungry law- 
yers, living on large retainers, not being quite happy 
at such easy settlements, especially if the generous vis- 
itor were found wealthy enough to go about buying up 
and burning claims, and ending litigation. This, to 
us hardly imaginable, was, however, actually the con- 
dition of things reflected in parts of the Epistle to the 
Hebrews. Therein the bond under which man suffers 



132 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

is clearly to him who hath the Power of Death, the 
Devil : Jesus ransomed man from the Devil. 

The anonymous tractate superscribed solely ''To the 
Hebrews," though the last admitted into the New Tes- 
tament, is probably the earliest document it contains. 
It has no doubt been tampered with, but the evidences 
of the early date of its conception of Christ remain. 
Not only was it evidently written before the destruction 
of the temple (^anno 70), but before there was any 
thought of a mission to the Gentiles, who, with Paul 
their apostle, are ignored. Some of its phrases and 
illustrations are found in epistles of Paul, but, as Dr. 
Davidson pointed out in his Introduction to the New 
Testament, the general doctrine of this treatise is far 
from Pauline, and it is difficult to find any reason for 
supposing that the few borrowings were not by Paul, 
other than a preference for Paul, and disinclination to 
admit that there is any anonymous work in the New 
Testament. The treatise is without Paul's egotism, or 
his fatalism, and its conception of the new movement 
seems decidedly more primitive than that in the 
recognised Pauline epistles. The sagacious Eusebius, 
"father of church history," connects the Epistle "To 
the Hebrews" with the "Wisdom of Solomon," and it 
seems clear that we have here the bridge between the 
last abutment of philosophic or "broad" Jahvism, and 
its "new departure" as Christism. 

It is not of especial importance to the present in- 
quiry to determine that Paul might not at some youth- 
ful period have written this work, though I cannot see 
how any critical reader can so imagine ; but it will bear 
indirectly on that point if we read successively the fol- 
lowing corresponding passages : 



EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS. 1 33 

Wisdom of Solomon. — "For Wisdom, which is the worker 
of all things, taught me . . . she is the breath of the 
power of God, and a pure influence flowing from the glory of 
the Almighty ; therefore can no unclean thing fall into her. 
For she is the brightness of the everlasting light, the unspotted 
mirror of the power of God, and the image of his goodness. 
And alone she can do all things ; herself unchanged, she maketh 
all things new: and in all ages entering into holy souls, she 
maketh them friends of God and prophets." — (vii. 25-27.) 
"And Wisdom was with thee : which knoweth thy works, and 
was present when thou madest the world." (ix. 9.) 

Epistle to the Hebrews. — "God, having in time past spoken 
to the fathers by many fragments and divers ways in the 
prophets, at the end of these days spake unto us in Son whom 
he constituted heir of all things, by whom also he fashioned the 
ages ; who, being the brightness of his light and the image of his 
substance, and guiding all things by the word of his authority, 
having made purification of sins, sat on the right of majesty in 
high places." (i. 1-3.) 

Epistle to the Colossians. — "Who (the Father) delivered us 
out of the power of darkness, and translated us into the king- 
dom of his son of love, in whom we have our redemption, the 
forgiveness of our sins : who is the image of the invisible God, 
the first-born of all creation; for in him were all things cre- 
ated, in the heavens and above the earth, things visible and 
things invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities 
or powers ; all things have been created through him and unto 
him; and he is before all things, and in him all things hold 
together." (i. 13-17-) 

Fourth Gospel— ''In the beginning was the Word, and the 
Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in 
the beginning with God. All things were made through him, 
and without him was not anything made. That which hath 
been made was life in him, and the life was the light of men. 
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld 
his glory— glory as of an only begotten of a Father full of 
grace and truth." (i. i-i5-) 

It appears to me that the evolution is represented in 
the order given. Paul's phrase, "first-born of all crea- 



134 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE, 

tion," is an amplification of the word ''first-born" used 
in the Epistle to the Hebrews, but there used in another 
connection, — and not solely, as we shall see, relating to 
Christ. Paul's phrase corresponds with "the only- 
begotten," etc., of John, and with the "son constituted 
heir" of the Epistle to the Hebrews, though the latter 
is a different Christological conception. When this 
writer's doctrinal statement is finished, and after his 
argument is begun, he says (i. 6), "But when of old 
bringing the first-born into the inhabited earth, he saith. 
And pay homage to him all angels of God." The 
word "first-born" here is probably the seed from which 
Paul develops his full flower of doctrine, given above. 
Paul's conception of a creative Christ seems later than 
the "guiding" Christ (Heb. i. 3), which recalls the func- 
tion of Wisdom as "director" at the creation (Prov. viii. 
30) ; and the idea in this epistle to the Hebrews of a 
previous and historical Christophany, while harmoni- 
ous with that of the "Wisdom of Solomon" (vii. 27), — 
that she (Wisdom) "in all ages enters into holy souls," 
— is so primitive, unique, and so foreign to Paul, that 
the writer may have been one of those accused by him 
of preaching "another Jesus" (2 Cor. ii. 4).* 

* Since this work was sent to the press the world has been enriched by 
Dr. McGiffert's "History of Christianity in the Apostolic Age." He pro- 
nounces the unknown author of the Epistle to the Hebrews "without doubt 
the finest and most cultured literary genius of the primitive church," but 
believes the Epistle to be somewhat later than those of Paul. He thinks its 
detailed description of proceedings in the temple might have been written 
after its destruction, as Clement's account was, and remarks that the writer 
always calls it the "tabernacle." This peculiarity I attribute to the empha- 
sis in the "Wisdom of Solomon" on the temple being "a resemblance of the 
holy tabernacle which thou hast prepared from the beginning" (ix. 8). It 
seems unlikely that the Epistle could have said "the priests go in con- 
tinually" etc. , had the temple not existed. Dr. McGifTert finds in some 
expressions indications that there were Gentiles among those to whom the 
Epistle was addressed, but even admitting this it is natural to suppose that 
there must have been some fellowship of this kind among educated people 
before Paul's propaganda. The passages referred to by Dr. McGifiert, if 
they imply what he supposes, render it all the more improbable that if Paul 
and his mission to the Gentiles preceded this Epistle, there should be no 
allusion to them in it. 



EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS. 135 

Although this Epistle contains the principle ascribed 
to Jesus, "charity and not sacrifice" (xiii. 9) and sub- 
stitutes for beasts the ''sacrifice of praise, the fruit of 
lips harmonious with his good name" (verse 15), the 
letter that killeth brought forth from the same chapter 
the fatal doctrine that the body of Jesus was a sacrifice 
to be eaten. And although this emphasizes the com- 
pleteness of his humanity to an extent inconsistent with 
his deity, it is on the letter of this Epistle that the 
deification of Christ is founded. 

V. 7-9. "Who in the days of his flesh, having offered up 
entreaties with vehement crying and tears to him able to save 
him out of death, and although inclined to because of his piety, 
yet, albeit a son, learned obedience by the things he suffered ; 
and having been made perfect, became unto all that follow him 
the author of eternal salvation."* 

He is represented as "made perfect through suffer- 
ings," as "tempted in all points like ( Pothers) without 
sin," and as having without assistance of temple or 
sacrifices, "obtained eternal redemption" (ix. 12). 
Thus he also needed redemption. 

The new covenant of which Jesus was the founder 
is described in the words of Jeremiah (xxxi.) : 

♦Thus spake Angra Mainyu, the guileful, the evil-doer, the deadly, 
"Fiend rush down upon him. destroy the holy Zoroaster !" The fiend came 
rushing along, the demon Buiti, the unseen death, the hell-born. Zoroaster 
chanted loudly the Ahuna-Vairya : "The will of the Lord is the law 9f holi- 
ness; the riches of Vohu-mano (heavenly wisdom) shall be given to him who 
works in this world for God (Mazda), and wields according to the all-know- 
ing (Ahura) the power he gave him to relieve the poor. Profess (O Fiend) 
the law of God!" The fiend dismayed rushed away, and said to Angra 
Mainyu "O baneful Angra Mainyu, I see no way to kill him, so great is the 
glory of the holy Zoroaster." Zoroaster saw all this from within his soul; 
"The evil-doing devils and demons take counsel together for my_ death." 
Up started Zoroaster, forward went Zoroaster, unshaken by the evil spirit. 
"(3 evil-doer, Angra Mainyu. I will smite the creation of the Evil One 
(Daeva) till the fiend-smiter Saoshyant (Saviour) come up to life out of the 
lake Kasava. from the region of tl;e dawn."— Vendidad, Farg. xix, 1-5. {Sa- 
cred Books of the East, Vol. iv. pp. 204-6.) 

The Ahuna-Vairya. recited bv Zoroaster, was the prayer by which 
Ormazd in his first conflict with Ahreinan drove him back to hell. 



136 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

I will put my laws into their mind, 

And on their heart will I write them 

And I will be to them a God, 

And they shall be to me a people : 

And they shall not teach every man his fellow-citizen, 

And every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord : 

For all shall know me, 

From the least unto the greatest. 

In quoting this the writer to the Hebrews adds: 
''In that he saith, 'A new (covenant) he hath made 
the first old. But that which is becoming old and 
waxeth aged is near unto vanishing entirely.' " Here 
is a primitive Quakerism, but more conservative; not 
like George Fox at once sweeping away priesthood 
sacraments and ecclesiastical laws before the Inner 
Light, but pointing to their near vanishing. 

The writer of this Epistle is a philosophical con- 
servative ; he shudders at the idea of a swift and com- 
plete overthrow of the traditional system, and even bor- 
rows its old thunders against levitical sin to menace 
offences against the new moral God. "Our God 
[also] is a consuming fire." It is evident by his very 
warnings that a great anti-sacerdotal and anti-levitical 
revolution had taken place, and that the free spirit was 
burgeoning out in excesses. But such is his culture 
that one may suspect his thunders of being theatrical, 
and that he thinks some superstition necessary for the 
masses. 

The fatal and subtle character of the detective Holy 
Spirit is imported into this Epistle from the "Wisdom 
of Solomon" (i. 6), though not so distinctly personified. 
The sin afterwards called "unpardonable" is here 
a sin against Christ for which repentance, not pardon, 
is impossible. We may perhaps find in some of the 



EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS. 1 37 

expressions germs of the legend of Judas. ''As touch- 
ing those who were once enhghtened, and tasted the 
heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy 
Spirit, and tasted the good word of God, and the powers 
of the age that is come, and fell away, it is impossible 
to renew them again to repentance, seeing they indi- 
vidually impale the Son of God afresh and put him to 
open shame" (vi. 5, 6). The believers are "not of 
them that shrink back into perdition" (x. 39) ; and 
they are warned to look carefully "whether there be any 
man that falleth back from the grace of God. . . . 
like Esau, who for one mess of meat sold his own 
birthright" (xii. 15, 16). The words "tasted," "per- 
dition," "sold," might start a legend of the betrayal, 
first alluded to by Paul (if i Cor. xi. 23 be genuine, 
which is doubtful), though had the legend of Judas then 
existed this writer would naturally have alluded to him 
along with Esau. 

This Epistle is the nursery of the titles of Christ; 
he is Apostle, Son of God, Son of Man, Great 
Shepherd, Captain of Salvation, Mediator, Great High 
Priest; and here alone is found the now familiar en- 
dearing phrase "Our Lord." These titles represent 
the functions of different beings in the Avesta. The 
conception of the work of Jesus on earth is largely 
Zoroastrian. The Majesty on high has a colony and 
a people on earth, which otherwise is under the su- 
premacy of the Evil One. As we have seen the 
Avestan definitions of Ahuramazda and Angra Mainyu, 
"the Living and the Not Living," are reflected in 
the phrases of this Epistle, — the "Power of Imperish- 
able Life" (vii. 16) and the "Power of Death" (ii. 14). 
Ahuramazda, when his "habitable earth" was prepared, 



138 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

brought into it his ''first-born," Yima, and wished him 
to propagate the divine law which should destroy the 
power of Angra Mainyu on earth and confine him in 
the underworld. Yima replied, ''I was not born, 
I was not taught, to be the preacher and the bearer 
of thy law." He engaged, however, to enlarge and 
nourish the garden of God on earth, of which he was 
king, and entitled ''the good shepherd." He obtained 
from the Holy Spirit, z\nahita, the powers thus enumer- 
ated in Aban Yast 26 : "He begged of her a boon, say- 
ing, 'Grant me this, O good, most beneficent Ardvi 
Sura Anahita, that I may become the sovereign lord 
of all countries, of the dsevas [devils] and men, of the 
Yatus [sorcerers] and Pairkas [seducing nymphs], of 
the oppressors [who' afflict] the blind and the deaf; 
and that I may take from the daevas [devils] both 
riches and welfare, both fatness and flocks, both 
weal and glory" [hvareno, "the glory from above 
which makes the king an earthly god"].* This "first- 
born" reigned a thousand years, but then, having 
ascribed his "glory" to the demons from whom he 
obtained wealth and material benefits, his "glory" was 
lost, and secured by the Devil, who reigned in his place 
a thousand years, blighting the world, when Zoroaster 
was born to undertake the establishment of the divine 
Law on earth. Yima was ultimately developed into 
the Jamshid of Persian mythology, whose power over 
demons, fabulous wealth, and ultimate fall (through 
d-eclaring himself a god, according to Firdusi) invested 
the legend of Solomon. 

From the legend of Solomon and the Solomonic 
Psalms the Epistle to the Hebrews brings its exaltation 

* Sacred Books of the East, Vol. xxiii. p. 59. 



EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS. 1 39 

of Christ. From Ps. Ixxxix. 26-7, as reproduced in 
2 Sam. vii. 14, is quoted (i. 5) the divine promise, 
"I will be to him (Solomon) a Father and he shall be 
my Son/V along with the manifesto at Solomon's 
enthronement (Ps. ii. 7), *Thou art my Son; this day 
have I begotten thee." Solomon is the "first-born" 
alluded to in Heb. i. 6: "When of old bringing the 
first-born into the inhabited earth ( ohooixhr^v ) he saith, 
And pay homage to him all angels of God ? 

And here we have an interesting example of evolu- 
tion in the Solomon legend. The term "first-born," as 
indicating the relation of a human being to the deity, 
occurs but once in the Old Testament, namely, in 
Psalm Ixxxix. 2"]. It occurs in a strange passage that 
must be quoted : 

19. Then thou spakest in vision to thy holy ones, 
And saidst, I have laid help upon a youth ; 

I have raised one elected out of the people. 

20. I have discovered David, my servant : 
With my holy oil have I anointed him, 

21. By whom my hand shall be established, 
Whom also mine arm shall strengthen. 

22. The enemy shall not do him violence, 
Nor the son of evil afflict him. 

23. I will beat down his adversaries before him 
And smite them that hate him. 

24. But my faithfulness and my mercy end not with him, 
And in my name shall his horn be exalted. 

25. I will extend his hand on the sea also, 
And his right hand on the rivers : 

26. He shall address me, "Thou, my father, 
My God, and the rock of my support" ; 

27. In answer I constitute him first-born, 
Elyon of the kings of the earth. 

Although in all of these verses the Davidic royalty 
is exalted, the reference to David's own reign passes at 



140 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

verse 24 into a celebration of Solomon. Here, as in 
Psalm cxxxii. 17, Solomon is the "horn" of David: 
he was distinctively the power on sea and river, 
phrases inapplicable to David, and there is a con- 
trast between the anointed ''servant" (verse 20) 
and the "first-born" (verse 27). The next title, 
"Elyon" (Most High), comes very near to that 
of the deity (El Elyon) of the mysterious priest- 
king of Salem, Melchizedek, whose mythical character 
and identity with the legendary Solomon will be here- 
after considered. 

Here we have no doubt the germs of the narrative in 
2 Sam. vii. of the formal adoption of Solomon as Jah- 
veh's son, with the addition of a metaphysical connota- 
tion of the sonship not found in the Psalm. In the 
Psalm the fatherhood is that of support, the position of 
"first-born" is that of chieftainship among kings; and 
it is further said (31, 32) that if any of the sons of the 
Davidic line profane the divine statutes, "Then will I 
visit their transgression with the rod, and their iniquity 
with stripes." But in 2 Sam. vii. 14, Jahveh applies 
this warning to Solomon alone, and with a remarkable 
modification : "I will be his father and he shall be my 
son : if he commit iniquity I will chasten him with the 
rod of men, and with the stripes of the sons of men; 
but my mercy shall not depart from him." That is, 
though a son of God he may be chastened like the sons 
of men, — an intimation of a difference between Solo- 
mon and ordinary human nature not intended in the 
words of the Psalm. 

The Epistle to the Hebrews, finding in this Psalm an 
introduction of "first-born" into the world, for there is 
no article preceding the word, follows it so closely as to 



EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS. 14I 

omit any article before "son" (i. 2). He finds this in 
an address of the deity to his angels ("holy ones" or 
saints), and understands verse 27 of the Psalm to mean 
that they, the angels, are to worship the "first-born" 
as the Elyon, or Most High on earth. From 2 Sam., vii. 
the Epistle gets sufficient authority for ascribing an 
eternal personality to the sonship, anciently represented 
by Solomon, and we may thus see that the gesture of 
Hebrew religion towards a doctrine of incarnation 
was much earlier than is generally supposed. And 
this, too, is the Hebrew contribution to a Psalm which, 
in the nine verses above quoted, imports ideas foreign 
to Judaism. The reciprocal help of the deity and the 
king (19-21) is Avestan, and inconsistent with mono- 
theism. Elyon is the name of an ancient Phoenician 
god, slain by his son El, no doubt the "first-born of 
death" in Job xviii. 13, and the violent "son of evil," 
in verse 22 of our Psalm. The exaltation of both David 
and Solomon in the Psalm is primarily in reference to 
service and deeds, not majesty, essence, or title; of 
these Avestan religion made little, but Hebraism made 
much, and the deification of Solomon, though warranted 
by other Psalms, is added to this eighty-ninth by Samuel 
and the Epistle to the Hebrews. 

In Ecclesiasticus it is written : "In the division of the 
nations of the whole earth he set a ruler over every peo- 
ple ; but Israel is the Lord's portion : whom, being his 
first-born, he nourisheth with discipline, and giving 
him the light of his love doth not forsake him. . . . 
For all things cannot be in men, because the son of man 
is not imim.ortal. What is brighter than the sun ? Yet 
the light thereof f aileth ; and flesh and blood will 
imagine evil" (xvii.). Now in the Zoroastrian theology 



142 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

there could be no direct contact of God with matter: 
the devil's empire could be invaded and death con- 
quered only by a perfectly "blameless" man. (Cf. 
*' Wisdom of Solomon," xviii. 21, with the ''sinless" of 
Heb. iv. 15, the "guileless" of vii. 26, and "without 
blemish," ix. 14). The spotless one can use no carnal 
weapon. In the Zoroastrian theology the divine po- 
tency is that of the Word, and formulas exist to be 
wielded against every variety of demon. So in this 
Epistle the supremacy of the Son is by "the word of his 
power" (i. 3), and "the Word of God is sharper than 
any two-edged sword" (iv. 12). 

The enterprise of the Son of God was to fulfil these 
conditions. He must become a complete man, share all 
the infirmities of man, all his liabilities to temptation, 
receive no assistance from his Father, no angelic help, — 
placed lower than the angels, — and confront the powers 
of Death and Hell without any material weapon. If 
he succeeded in remaining sinless, faithful to the divine 
law, even unto death, even while in hell, unshaken by 
threats, sufferings, or seductions, it must be a purely 
human achievement. There was no miracle ; even the 
suspicion of using supernatural power would have 
tainted the whole work of Jesus as conceived in this 
Epistle. 

This undertaking was not simply for the sake of man- 
kind. All things are not yet subjected to the divine 
sway (Heb. ii. 8). Heaven itself was shaken, when 
the old covenant failed, and trembled for the result of 
the tremendous conflict of the Son of Man on earth 
with its Prince and his hosts (Heb. xii. 25-29). This 
was "the joy in front of him" (xii. 2), as well as the 
rescue of men. 



EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS. 143 

Thus was the man left entirely to the devil, not even 
his life being reserved, as in the case of Job. He loudly 
cries for help, even with tears, at the sight of Death; 
he is heard, pitied, but no help comes. He must trust 
to his human merits, and not miracles, for his Sonship 
is of no value in this conflict. By his obedience learned 
in his sufferings, by his sinlessness under all trials and 
temptations, he fulfilled the conditions of deathlessness. 
By his own heart's blood, not by offerings of bloody 
sacrifices, not by supernatural power, he reached the 
place of holiness, "having obtained eternal redemption." 
From first to last there was no divine aid. His un- 
answered loud cries (Heb. v. 7) may be connected with 
the legend of his expiring cry, ''My God, my God, why 
hast Thou forsaken me?" 

Much of the thought here is similar to the ''Wisdom 
of Solomon" (ii. 22-4, iii. 1-9), where however the ideas 
are conflicting. It is said, "God created man to be 
immortal, and made him to be an image of his own 
eternity : nevertheless, through the devil's envy came 
death into the world, and they that hold of his side do 
find it." But then Jahvism puts in with the declaration 
that the seeming destruction of the righteous is 
God's chastisement and probation of them. The Epistle 
to the Hebrews does not regard the sufferings and death 
of Jesus as God's work at all, but all from the devil. 
Though God spoke by him there is no suggestion that 
he sent Jesus, or that his coming was not voluntary. 

With this reservation, and a large one it is, that Jesus 
was not delivered up to Satan by God, but left to con- 
front his torments in an effort to subdue him, "bring 
him to nought," the central idea of the Epistle is a 
doctrinal transfiguration of Job, who being delivered up 



144 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

to Satan, triumphs over the tempter and tormentor, 
and through all preserves his sinlessness and loyalty to 
God. The result being that those who had denied Job's 
merits, his sinlessness, had to secure Job's interces- 
sion in order to escape the penalty of having ascribed 
his sufferings to God (Job xlii. 8).* This relationship 
of ideas is all the more interesting because apparently 
unconscious in the writer of the Epistle, and thus 
revealing the extent to which Oriental religion had re- 
moulded Judaism among the educated Jews of his time. 
Monotheism is strictly inconsistent with the supremacy 
of "merits" which is the very soul of Oriental religion. 
The sacred books of India contain records of saints 
or Rishis who by extraordinary austerities, sacrifices, 
and virtues so piled up their ''merits" that the gods 
were frightened, as they were at the tower of Babel; 
and sometimes the gods tempted these powerful saints 
to commit some sin that would reduce their "merits." 
The Solomonic "Proverbs" are pervaded by the Orien- 
tal doctrine of "merits" : a man is proved by test of his 
merits, as gold passing through the furnace (xxvii. 
2i); the perfect inherit good (xxviii. lo) ; and per- 
haps that sublime pedlar of transcendent gems im- 
ported along with the gold of Ophir some version of the 
Puranic legend of Harischandra, "the Hindu Job." 
All the Jahvist adulterations of the biblical version do 
not conceal the fact that when Jahveh, by delivering 
the meritorious man up to Satan, delivered himself also 
into the hands of Satan, he (Jahveh) was compelled 
to surrender before the merits on which the man had 
planted himself. Jahveh reclaimed his sovereignty, 
but agreed that Job, who had said "God hath wronged 

* It is even doubtful v/hether they were not ordered to offer burnt offer- 
ings to Job as a deity. 



EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS. 145 

me," had spoken of him "the thing that is right" (xlii. 
8). In the same way the storm-god Indra (the Hindu 
Jahveh) accompanied by all the gods, headed by 
Dharma (Justice), appears to Harischandra after his 
trials, and tells him that he, his wife and son, had, by 
their merits, "conquered heaven" (Markajtdeya Pur- 
ana). The completion of these merits was when Haris- 
chandra resolved with his wife to die on the funeral 
pyre of their son, who, as a result of their torments, 
had died by a serpent's bite. It was then that the god 
Indra appeared to restore the son, and admit that the 
just and faithful king, his wife and son, had "con- 
quered heaven." We are thus carried to the Solomonic 
affirmations that "when the whirlwind passeth the just 
man is on an everlasting foundation" (Prov. x. 25), 
that "justice delivereth from death" (x. 2), that "the 
just man finds a refuge in death" (xiv. 32) ; and we are 
carried forward to the Epistle to the Hebrews, where, 
after the last ordeal, death, the son of the heavenly 
king is restored to life, and Satan, who had over him 
the power of death, "brought to nought" (ii. 14). But 
further, in the Puranic legend, which from time 
immemorial has been a passion-play in India, Haris- 
chandra, when told that he, his wife and son, had "con- 
quered heaven," refused to ascend to heaven withoul: 
his "faithful subjects." "This request was granted by 
Indra, and after Viswamitra had inaugurated Rohit- 
aswa, the king's son, to be his successor, Harischandra, 
his friends and followers, all ascended to heaven." 
Thus, in our Epistle, the son, having "learned obedience 
by the things which he suffered, and having been made 
perfect, became unto all them that obeyed him the 
author of eternal salvation." "For in that he hath him- 



146 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE, 

self suffered being tempted, he is able to succor them 
that are tempted." The subjects of King Harischandra 
who remained faithful to him after he was reduced to 
beggary, ascended with him. Faith is declared in our 
Epistle to be "the testing of things not seen" (xi. i), 
and faithfulness is to "run with patience the course 
that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the captain and 
perfector of faithfulness, who for the joy set before 
him endured the stake ( ffraopov), despising shame, and 
hath sat down at the right hand of the throne of God" 
(xi. I, xii. I, 2). 

And there is also, I believe, in the scheme of redemp- 
tion set forth in this Epistle, an influence from the story 
of King Usinara in the Mahabharata, of which there 
were various versions which must have been familiar to 
the Buddhists in Alexandria. A dove pursued by a fal- 
con takes refuge in the bosom of Usinara; the falcon 
demands its surrender. The King quotes the law of 
Manu that it is a great sin to abandon any being that 
has taken asylum with one. The falcon urges that it is 
the law of nature that falcons shall feed on doves, and 
that unless this dove is surrendered its little falcons 
must starve. The King offers other food, but the only 
substitute that is adapted to the falcon's nature is a 
quantity of Usinara's own flesh equal to the weight of 
the dove. To this the King agrees. Balances are 
produced, and the dove placed in one scale, in the other 
a piece of the King's flesh, which seems large enough, 
but is insuflicient. Though the King cuts off piece by 
piece all of his flesh, the dove outweighs it, until at 
length Usinara gets into the scale himself. That out- 
weighs the dove, which is really Agni, the falcon being 
Indra. The gods who had assumed these forms in order 



EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS. 1 47 

to test Usinara's fidelity to the law of sanctuary, resume 
their shape, and the King ascends transfigured to para- 
dise. In one version a King (Givi) sacrifices his son, 
Vrihad-Gasbha in obedience to sacred requirements, 
the story resembling that of Abraham and Isaac. Al- 
ford calls attention to the emphasis on the word "him- 
self" in the Epistle of the Hebrews ix. 14: "How 
much more shall the blood of Christ, who, through the 
eternal Spirit offered himself, without blemish, unto 
God, cleanse our conscience from dead works to serve 
the living God." 

Without blemish ! That was the great point. The 
champion of the Good confronts the champion of Evil, 
his purpose being to conquer the last enemy. Death, by 
unarmed human virtue. This was the central idea in 
the Passion, a drama gone to pieces in the Gospels. 
Therefore, he did not summon legions of angels, and 
said to Peter, "Sheath thy sword." Therefore, the 
mere lynching of Jesus, for such it was, is given the 
formalities of judicial procedure, in order to impress 
an official character on the testimonies to his innocence : 
Pilate, Caiaphas, Pilate's wife, Judas, Herod, all bear 
witness that no evil is in him, and he challenges the 
High Priest's court, "If I have uttered evil bear wit- 
ness of the evil.""^ In this passion-drama Jesus Barab- 
bas is set beside Jesus the Christ, — officially pro- 
claimed guilt beside officially proclaimed innocence, — 
and Wrath selects guilt, condemns innocence. But it 
was thus the first-bom of Life prevailed over the first- 

*It is. I think, an indication of the nearness of the "Gospel according to 
the Hebrews" to the Apostolic Age that a sort of caveat is there recorded 
against the possible implication that the baptism of Jesus was for remission 
of sins. "He said to them, Wherein have I sinned that I should go and be 
baptized by him?" The whole passage is quoted on a farther page, but it 
may be stated here that the descending dove certifies the sinlessness of Jesus 
before his baptism. The Synoptics introduce the dove after the baptism. 
The significance of the scene was thus lost. 



148 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

born of Death. In that crisis the blameless man 
swerving not from his rectitude, established the 
''assembly of the first-born," who can dwell with the 
living God because they have learned from their Cap- 
tain hov/ to get rid of the defilement of mortality. 
There is nothing vicarious in his service. The Captain 
represented the human race in a single combat with 
Satan, and he discovered for all the vulnerable point 
of that Adversary, — that he could not hold in sheol a 
perfectly sinless human being. But it still remained 
that without holiness no man could see the Lord. An- 
other advantage secured by Jesus for men was that 
after his victory was achieved the heroic man, on resum- 
ing his previous position as Son of God, was able to add 
thereto what he had won as Son of Man, — the office of 
high priest or intercessor, who could take good care 
that every man who fulfilled the condition of holiness 
got his reward. Satan should not cheat. Neverthe- 
less Jesus had been his own saviour, and every man 
must be his own saviour. 

Pulpit ignorance has wrested from the Epistle to the 
Hebrews fragments of texts, in support of a dogma of 
atonement which only a fortunate lack of logic prevents 
from amounting to a doctrine of human sacrifice. A 
favorite clause is, "Without the shedding of blood there 
in no remission," — which is really this epistle's stigma 
on the system it is abolishing ! The sacredness of the 
blood of Jesus was that it was the price he had tO' pay 
to the devil in order to preserve his sinlessness, and so 
rise from death, and demonstrate to others that they also 
could rise by sinlessness to eternal life. It might cost 
their blood also, but would be lost if they "resisted 
unto blood." Jesus thus brought life and incorrupn 



EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS. 149 

tion, as distinguished from living-death in sheol, to 
light. And the devotion to Jesus for this was due to 
the belief that he had laid aside his heavenly glory and 
become a complete man, and had thus risked his all, his 
greatness, his very immortality, to make for both 
heaven and earth the tremendous venture ; the slightest 
misstep, the least sin, or wrath, or impatience, and he 
would have had his abode in sheol, in bonds of Satan, 
through all eternity. 

When this Epistle was written the believers already 
found immortality in such faith; with such hope and 
joy before them they were able to despise sensual joys, 
to conquer temptations, and to fulfill those duties and 
conditions of personal holiness which are described in 
this Epistle, — 'Teace with all men, and holiness with- 
out which no man can see the Lord." The ecstasy did 
not last long, but it was a marv^ellous phenomenon 
while it lasted, and the most complete reflection of it 
may be found in this Epistle to the Hebrews, especially 
if it be approached by its prologue, — the "Wisdom of 
Solomon," — but it is subtle, and can only be compre- 
hended by patient and comparative studies. 

At the heart of this earliest and swiftly lost Chris- 
tianity was a sublime effort to humanize God. 






CHAPTER XIV. 

SOLOMON MELCHIZEDEK. 

It is possible that the genealogies of Jesus started 
from no other basis than Hebrews vii. 14 : "It is clear 
beforehand that our Lord hath arisen out of Judah."* 
Yet nothing could be more subversive of the Epistle 
than a claim of any hereditary authority or advantage 
for Jesus, 

The author of the Epistle, if he ever heard the phrase 
"Son of David," avoided it, for David is here in the 
background, and in a quotation from one of his Psalms 
his name is passed over, with the vague words, "one 
hath testified somewhere, saying," etc. It is an essen- 
tial part of the writer's argument that Christ is "with- 
out genealogy" of that kind. To some it was no doubt 
grateful to be told that Jesus was not of the priestly 
tribe, not of that "apostolic succession," so to say ; but 
it was more important to convince the conservative that 
their sacred history sanctioned faith in a higfh priest 
approved as such not by carnal descent, but by his sin- 
lessness and by his resurrection. But it was not agree- 
able to any Jewish party to suppose that the new- 
dominion was to be altogether in the heavens, or de- 
tached from the Solomonic Golden Age for whose 

* It is doubtful whether this can be regarded as historical. The "clear 
beforehand" (tt^oo^tjAov) renders it more probable that it is a reference to 
Ps, Ixxviii. 67, 68. " He refused the tent of Joseph, and chose not the tribe of 
Ephraim, but chose the tribe of Judah," etc. 

150 



SOLOMON MELCHIZEDBK. 15 i 

return they were hoping. The writer therefore con- 
nects Jesus with a "first-born" forerunner, namely, with 
Melchizedek, concerning whom he "has many things 
to say, and hard of interpretation." So Christian com- 
mentators have to this day found what he does say, and 
Melchizedek is not surrounded by any dogmatic fence 
that can turn a new hypothesis into a trespass. 
The Epistle applies to Jesus lines from Psalm ex. : 

Thou art a priest for ever, 
After the order of Melchizedek. 

But in this anonymous Psalm there is reason to be- 
lieve that Melchizedek is not a proper name at all. It 
is admittedly a combination of malki'-tzedek, "king of 
justice," and in the Jewish Family Bible (Deusch) the 
above lines are translated, "Thou art my priest for ever, 
my king in righteousness, by my word." The Septua- 
gint, regularly followed by the Epistle to the Hebrews, 
has Melchizedek in this Psalm ex., which was also mes- 
sianized by the LXX. in its very first line, "The Lord 
said unto my Lord," Kupioq being the word for Lord in 
both cases, whereas in the original the words are 
different ("Jahveh declared to my Adonai"). And it 
is notable that Matthew xxii. whose Hebraic character 
is so marked, and Mark xii., both make Jesus follow 
the Septuagint in quoting these words. 

In both of these Gospels the incident is evidently, in 
Mark clumsily, interpolated, and it would appear to 
have belonged to some legend of the Infancy, such as 
that of the Arabic Gospel of the Infancy, where it oc- 
curs naturally : 

"And when he was twelve years old they took him to Jeru- 
salem to the feast. But when the feast was over they indeed 
returned, but the Lord Jesus remained in the temple among 



152 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

the doctors and elders and learned men of Jerusalem, and he 
asked them sundry questions about the sciences and they 
answered him in turn. Now he said to them, Whose son is 
Messiah? They answered him, The son of David. Where- 
fore, then, said he, Doth he in spirit call him Lord, when he 
saitli the Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, 
that I may bring down thy enemies to the footprints of thy 
feet?" 

It is probable that this anecdote had floated down 
from an early period when the notion of a royal descent 
of Jesus had not arisen. 

Obviously a tremendous question arises here as to 
how a story should be found in Genesis xiv. about Mel- 
chizedek, which as a proper name really occurs nowhere 
else in the Hebrew Bible,* and the mystery is increased 
by the absence of any allusion to such a personage in 
Jesus Ben Sira's enumeration of "famous men" (Ecclus. 
xliv.), or elsewhere. It almost looks as if Jesus Ben 
Sira had not read, or else had cancelled as spurious, the 
strange passage in Genesis — which is as follows : 

"And Melchizedek, King of Salem, brought forth bread and 
wine ; and he was priest of El-Elyon. And he blessed him and 
said. Blessed be Abram of El-Elyon, purchaser of heaven and 
earth ; and blessed be El-Elyon, which hath delivered thine ene- 
mies into thy hand. And he (Abram) gave him a tenth of all." 

Professor Max Miiller, in, his third lecture on the 
''Science of Religion," gives some useful information 
concerning this peculiar name, "El-Elyon," after con- 
sulting his contemporaries at Oxford and in Germany : 

"One of the oldest names of the deity among the an- 
cestors of the Semitic nations was El. It meant Strong. 
It occurs in the Babylonian inscriptions as Ilu, God, 
and in the very name of Bab-il, the gate or temple of 

*The King of Sodom came out to Abram at the same time, but no 
proper name is assigned him. 



SOLOMON MELCHIZEDEK. 1 53 

II. . . . The same El was worshipped at Byblus 
by the Phoenicians, and he was called there the Son of 
Heaven and Earth. His father was the son of EHuHj 
the most high God, who had been killed by wild ani- 
mals. The Son of Eliun, who succeeded him, was 
dethroned, and at last slain by his own son, El, whom 
Philo identifies with the Greek Kronos, and represents 
as the presiding deity of the planet Saturn . . . 
Elyon, which, in Hebrew, means the Highest is used in 
the Old Testament as a predicate of God. ... It 
occurs in the Phoenician cosmogony as Eliun, the high- 
est God, the Father of Heaven, who was the father 
of El" 

According to Sanchunvaton (Euseb. Proep. i. 10) 
the Phoenicians called God Ihobv. 

The combination El Elyon occurs in but two chap- 
ters in the Bible, — Genesis xiv. and Psalm Ixxviii. 
(The Revisers translate it in Genesis, "God Most 
High," but in the Psalm (verse 35), ''Most High 
God.") That the name was imported from the earlier 
into the later chapter is suggested by a similar associa- 
tion of each with the idea of purchase or redemption : 
''God Most High, purchaser of heaven and earth" 
(Genesis), "God Most High, their redeemer" (Psalm). 
But which is the earlier? Probably the Psalm; for it 
is a long resume of the traditional history of Israel, but 
contains no allusion to Abraham. Had its unique 
name, "El Elyon," been derived from any such tradi- 
tional source surely some mention of Abraham would 
have been made. 

The Psalm is Elohistic. Possibly the Phoenician 
name for God, Elioun, was used in order to set "El" 
above it. Or it may be that as Solomon had been 



154 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE, 

declared *'Ely6n of Kings" (Psalm Ixxxix. 27) it was 
important to recall that he at the same time said, "My 
Elohim," and to place ''El" before his title. This con- 
jecture is warranted by the fact that in both of the 
Psalms, and in the corresponding passages, God is 
spoken of as a ''Rock." There are other resemblances 
between the two Psalms, one very striking : 

Psalm Ixxviii. 70 — "He chose David also, his servant, 
and took him from the sheepfolds." 

Psalm Ixxxix. 19, 20 — "I have raised one elected out 
of the people; I have discovered David, my servant." 

The Psalm in which the Septuagint personalizes 
malki' -tzedek (ex.) into "Melchizedek" is a fragmen- 
tary little piece, with two incomprehensible verses at 
the end which seem to allude to some legend or folklore 
now lost. These verses (6 and 7) are incongruous with 
the preceding ones and must be detached, and perhaps 
verse 5 also, as this seems an anti-climax. These clos- 
ing verses look as if they may have been added by some 
admirer of Joshua's slaughter of kings, and it is prob- 
able that the legend of Joshua's making his captains 
tread on the necks of the five kings (Joshua x.) was 
developed out of the opening verse of this Psalm : 

"Jahveh said to my lord [Adonai], Sit thou at my right hand, 
Until I make thine enemies thy footstool." 

The leader of these kings was Adonai-Zedek, who, 
like Melchizedek, was King of Jerusalem ; they are cer- 
tainly mythical relatives, their names meaning "Lord of 
Justice" and "King of Justice." It is philologically 
impossible that any persons with those proper names 
could have existed in Jerusalem before the invasion of 
the Hebrews. And "Adonai-bezek," the "radiant 
lord," whose thumbs and toes Joshua cut off when he 



SOLOMON MELCHIZEDEK. 155 

captured Jerusalem, is a transparent variant of Adonai- 
zedek. 

When the city, originally named Jebus, began to be 
called Salem (see Psalm Ixxvi. 2), the aboriginal peo- 
ple who continued to dwell there might naturally dream 
of their ancient kings, as the Welch and Bretons so long 
did of Arthur, "flower of kings," and perhaps similarly 
expect their return to restore their ancient freedom ; 
and it may have become a useful political device to find 
beyond the ugly legends of Joshua's cruelty to their 
"just" and "shining" lords a prettier one, made out of 
an old song, of an earlier "King of Justice," whose 
bread and wine Abraham had eaten, to whom he had 
paid tithes, whose deity, El Elyon, the father of Israel 
had recognized as his own, and with whom he had made 
a treaty of salem, or peace, — Jebus thus becoming 
Jebus-Salem (Jerusalem). 

Josephus records the legend as it was no doubt gen- 
erally accepted among the Jews in the first century of 
our era : "Now, the King of Sodom met him ( Abram) 
at a certain place which they called the Kings Dale, 
where Melchizedek, King of the City of Salem, received 
him. That name signifies the righteous king, and such 
he was without dispute, insomuch that on that account 
he was made the priest of God. However, they after- 
ward called Salem Jerusalem." (Antiq. Bk. i. ch. 10.) 

Josephus is careful to identify Salem as Jerusalem, 
and in vi. ch, 10 of the same work states that the King's 
Dale (identified as the Shaveh where Abraham met 
Melchizedek, Genesis xiv.) is "two furlongs distant 
from Jerusalem." This carefulness may have been 
intended to distinguish Melchizedek's Salem from the 
northern Shalem (Genesis xxxiii. 18), a place associ- 



156 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

ated with Jacob, and apparently representing an attempt 
to set up a rival temple to that in Jerusalem. It was an 
old competition about tithes. Abraham paid tithes to 
Melchizedek, King of Salem, but Jacob, after his vision 
at Bethel, recognized that as the ''house of God," and 
vowed to give to God a tenth of all that was given him 
(Genesis xxviii).^ This quarrel between rival towns 
and temples, trying each to draw all tithes to themselves, 
harmonized in the later legends of the Bible, need not 
detain us, but it is of importance to remark that the 
story of Abram meeting the King of Justice and Peace 
near Jerusalem, and establishing the sanctity of that 
city, corresponds with, and is counterbalanced by, 
Jacob's meeting with angels, and wrestling with a 
mysterious "man," who, it is hinted, was some form of 
God himself. This reply to the story of Abram sug- 
gests that at the time of that tithe controversy between 
Bethel and Sion Melchizedek was not thought of as a 
flesh-and-blood king or a mere man, but as a shadowy 
shape, evoked from actual conditions for certain pur- 
poses, and named in accordance with the history or 
traditions out of which the conditions and the aims were 
evolved. 

* The " Salem " of Gen. xiv. 18, and the "Shalem " of Gen. xxiii. 18, are 
evidently competitive. Also Jacob's naming his altar " El-Elohe-Israel " seems 
an answer to Abraham's " El-Elyon," as ifsaying that the latter was not the 
God of Israel. It is even possible that the name " Luz " (Gen. xxviii. 19) 
changed to Beth-El, after Jacob's vision of the Ladder and seUing up the 
pillar there, is meant to correspond with the "oaks of Mamre" (Gen. xiv. 13), 
where Abram dwelt when he was met by the priest of El Elyon. For Abram 
had also built an altar at some place called Beth-El (Gen. xiii. 3) where he 
called on the name of the Lord and received a promise that his seed should 
be " as the dust of the earth," which is verbatim the promise made to Jacob at 
his Beth-El (Gen. xxviii. 14). Now Abram next moves his tent to the "oak 
of Mamre" in Hebron (Gen. xiii. 18), and the Hebrew word for oak is FAah. 
or Eylon. The unusual name for the deity of both Abram and Melchizedek, 
El-Elyon, was probably selected because of its resemblance to the sacred 
oak or Elah of that place, and Jacob's Y\- Elohe-\%x2.€i was no doubt meant to 
invest his deity with the same sanctity. Now " Luz " also means a tree, — 
almond-tree, — and was also a name of the Assyrian goddess Ishtar. The oak 
was associated also with Jacob, who buried beneath it the idols of his house- 
hold (Gen. xxxv. 1-9) immediately before setting up his altar at Luz (the 
almond). 



SOLOMON MELCHIZEDEK. 157 

In investigations of this kind, concerned with ages 
really prehistoric, it is necessary to remember at every 
step that our search is amid eras when words and names 
were at once counters of actual forces and factors of 
history. How serious a play on words may be even in 
historic times is illustrated by a Papacy founded on the 
double meaning of Peter — a man's name and a rock, — 
and as we approach earlier epochs, whose issues and 
struggles have long passed away, and their once an- 
tagonistic leaders harmonised by pious legends, it is 
largely by the aid of words and names that we are 
enabled to reach even historic probabilities. 

As to Melchizedek, my inference above stated, de- 
rived from the two tithe legends, that his supernatural 
character is reflected in that of the corresponding phan- 
toms met by Jacob may not be generally accepted, but 
that he (Melchizedek) was so understood by the writer 
to the Hebrews can hardly be disputed. Melchizedek 
is there (Hebrews vii.) declared to have been "without 
father, without mother, without genealogy, having 
neither beginning of days nor end of life, being assim- 
ilated unto the Son of God." 

In the third century the Melchizedekian sect main- 
tained that Melchizedek was not a man but a heavenly 
power superior to Jesus, and the Hieracites held similar 
views. Some eminent theologians have believed that 
Melchizedek was Christ himself. Most of the Christian 
theories concerning the mysterious king are virtual 
admissions that only the eye of faith can see in him any 
actual being at all. How then was this mythical being 
formed ?'^ 

* It may be said in passing, that the legend in Gen. xiv., as was first 
pointed out in Calmet, bears some resemblance to the Hindu myth of Soma, 
a lunar being, who discovered the juice of the sacred Soma plant {Asclepias 
acida), called "the king of plants." Soma was the most sacred sacrifice to 



158 



SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 



1. A suitable nest for the Melchizedek Saga existed 
near Jerusalem, in a vale called the King's Dale. It 
seems to have been a royal racing ground (Targum of 
Onkelos, Gen. xiv. 17) or hippodrome (Ixx. xlviii. 7), 
and its name in Hebrew was Emek-ham-M^/^cA. 

2. In the ancient Psalm ex. i we have Adonai 
(Lord), and in verse 4 ikf^/c/zi-Melech (or Moloch) 
king, combined with tsedek, justice. 

3. Tsedek (Tsaydoc or Zadok), the priest who 
anointed Solomon to be king. Tsaydoc supplanted the 
legitimate High Priest Abiathar who had taken the side 
of the legitimate heir to David's throne, Adonijah, sup- 
planted by Solomon. The deprivation of Abiathar, 
and exaltation of Tsaydoc to be High Priest is said 
(i Kings ii. 2y) to have been in fulfillment of ''the 
word of Jahveh, which he spake concerning the house 
of Eli in Shiloh." The reference is to the sentence 
passed on Eli and his house, to which Abiathar be- 
longed, when Jahveh said, "And I will raise me up a 
faithful priest, etc.," (i Sam. ii. 35). Faithful priests 

the gods, as a juice; it had the intoxicating effect of wine; and the lunar 
being, Soma, was believed to be still alive, though invisible, and is the chief 
of the sacerdotal tribe to this day. In the Vishnu Purana, Soma is called 
" the monarch of Brahmans " He was the Hindu Bacchus, and is regarded 
as the guardian of healing plants and constellations. Melchizedek, offering 
wine to, and as priest of God Most High receiving tribute from, the "High 
Father" (Abram), thus bears some resemblance to Soma, the sacerdotal 
moon-god; and those who care to study the matter further may be reminded 
that in Babylonian mythology Malkit seems to be a "Queen of Heaven" 
(moon), and is connected by Goldziher (Heb. Myth.) with Milka (Abram's 
sister-in-law), whom he supposes to have the same meaning. It is remark- 
able, by the way, that the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, in telling the 
story of Abram and Melchizedek minutely and critically, omits the offering 
of bread and wine. This is not only an indication that the Epistle was writ- 
ten as already said, before Paul's institution of the eucharist (i Cor. x., xi.), 
but suggests that the writer may have suspected the offerings as pagan. The 
Soma juice was sacred also in Persia, and is the Horn of the Avesta. Ewald 
says of the story in Gen. xiv., "The whole narrative looks like a fragment torn 
from a more general history of Western Asia, merely on account of the men- 
tion of Abraham contained in it." {Hist, of Israel., p. 308. London, 1867.) 
And finally it may be noted that among the kings Abram smote, just before 
meeting Melchizedek. was Chedorlaomer, King of Elam. Elam is south of 
Assyria and east of Persia proper; if he fought Abram near Jerusalem, Ched- 
orlaomer was about one thousand miles from his kingdom, Efam. Prob- 
ably it was not he but a name and legend of his kingdom that drifted into 
Jewish folklore. 



SOLOMON MELCHIZEDEK. 159 

were called "sons of Zadok," the phrase having appar- 
ently become proverbial (Ezek. xliv. 15). 

4. In I Chron. iii. there appear, among the descend- 
ants of Solomon, "Amaziah, Azariah his son, Jotham 
his son." In i Chron. vi. we find among descendants 
of Zadok, Ahimaaz, Azariah his son, Johanan his son. 
Johanan is also among Solomon's descendants, and 
among the descendants of both Solomon and Zadok is 
Shallum, — written by Josephus Salloumos (Bk. x. ch. 
8). Josephus also says that Zadok was the first High 
Priest of Solomon's Temple. But Solomon himself, 
without the assistance of any priest, dedicated the Tem- 
ple, offered the sacrifices on that occasion, and so con- 
tinued : "three times in a year did Solomon offer burnt 
offerings and peace offerings upon the altar which he 
built to Jahveh." (i Kings ix. 25). These statements 
establish a probability that no such person as Zadok 
existed at all, and that the development of this personi- 
fication of justice (zedek) into a priestly personage 
was due to an ecclesiastical necessity of introducing a 
priest among the provisions of Solomon for the temple. 
Zadok is thus a detachment from King Solomon of the 
priestly functions he had discharged in the temple, 
according to the book of Kings ; and in i Chron. vi., 
where this personification is completed, the Solomonic 
family names are found, as above, recurring as de- 
scendants of the personification, — Zadok. 

These names are the fossil remains of controversies 
with Shilonite and Samaritan pretensions, which ended 
in consecrating the throne and altar at Jerusalem, and 
they prove that the consecration was that of justice and 
peace. Of these the Wise Man was typical. Solomon 
was the model from whom all of these ideals were 



l6o SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

painted. His title, Adonai, and his equity (Psalm xlv. 
7, ii) are combined in Adonizedek, his glory (Psalm 
xlv. 3, 4) is in Adonibezek; his high priesthood is 
allegorized in Zadok; and in "Melchizedek, King of 
Salem," his supreme characters are summed up, "King 
of Justice, Prince of Peace." 

In a warlike age this peacefulness of a monarch was 
the great and supernatural phenomenon. It is the very 
central idea of the whole Solomonic legend. Solomon 
got his name from it, even the name with Jahveh in it 
(Jedediah) being set aside ; he was preferred above David 
to build the temple, because David was a warrior; in 
building the temple the peace was not broken even by 
the noise of a hammer, the stones being all in shape, it 
seems by supernatural power, when taken from the 
quarry, so as to be noiselessly fitted together ; he would 
not fight even those who were rending parts of his king- 
dom away. He was the hero of the Beatitudes, — the 
gentle one who inherited the earth, the one who hun- 
gered and thirsted for justice and was filled, the peace- 
maker called the Son of God. It was he who first said, 
If thine enemy hunger give him food, if he thirst give 
him drink. And all this was allegorized in Melchize- 
dek, who, when his country was invaded, instead of 
joining the five kings who resisted, loved his enemy, 
gave the invader food and drink. 

We thus find Solomon, — the glorious cosmopolitan 
and secularist, whose name Jahvism could not utter 
without a shudder, — distributed in fable, legend, psalm, 
through Hexateuch and Hagiographa, and finally trans- 
figured into a type of divine and eternal Sonship. Thus 
be appears in the Epistle to the Hebrews, to which we 
now return. 



SOLOMON MELCHIZEDEK, l6l 

In the Epistle to the Hebrews Christ is invested with 
the mystical robes of Solomon. To Christ are applied 
the words, "I will be to him a Father, and he shall be to 
me a Son," quoted from Jahveh's promise to David 
concerning Solomon (2 Sam. vii. 14). To Christ are 
twice applied the words, "Thou art my Son, this day 
have I begotten thee," quoted from Psalm ii. 7, ad- 
mittedly Solomonic. From Psalm xlv., verses 6 and 7, 
ascriptions to Solomon, are applied to Christ in this 
Epistle. And Melchizedek is here declared tO' be "a 
great man," ''assimilated unto the Son of God." 

We may here recall the words of Josephus, a con- 
temporary of our writer, who says that Mslchizedek 
was made the priest of God on account of his righteous- 
ness (Ant., Bk. i. ch. 10). It may have been that there 
was a popular belief in the time of Josephus that Mel- 
chizedek received his ordination from Abram himself, 
but there is no doubt that the mysterious king's priest- 
hood was believed to rest upon his righteousness and 
above all his peacefulness. 

With these preliminaries we may find the Epistle's 
argument about Melchizedek less ''hard of interpreta- 
tion" than the writer says it is. After speaking of 
Abraham as having "obtained" the promise, not merely 
because it was God's promise, but because he "patiently 
endured," having argued that Christ, "though he was a 
Son, yet learned obedience by the things that he suf- 
fered", this Epistle maintains (vi. 20) that this is the 
believer's hope, whereby he enters within the veil, 
"whither as a forerunner Jesus entered for us, having 
become a high priest forever after the manner of Mel- 
chizedek." (The sense of this is lost in the E. V. 
by rendering y^^oixv^o^; "made" : the argument is that 



l62 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

though he was a Son of God even that could not make 
him a high priest ; this he had to ''become" by his own 
merits, uninheritable even from God, as was the case 
with Melchizedek.) "For this Melchizedek, being of 
Salem, priest of God Most High, who met Abraham 
returning from the slaughter of the kings, and blessed 
him, to whom also Abraham divided a tenth part of all 
(being first by interpretation King of Righteousness, 
and next also King of Salem, that is Prince of Peace ; 
being without father, without mother, without gene- 
alogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, 
but assimilated (s/wv dipiofiotoiaivoq) unto the Son of 
God), abideth a priest perpetually" (vii. 1-3). 

The mystical clauses of verse 3 have for centuries 
been an unsolved enigma to exegetists; and Alford, 
after summing up the many conjectures as to their 
meaning, expresses his feeling that the writer had a 
thought which he did not intend us to comprehend! 
Probably, however, the writer was using language 
understood in his time, and which may be interpreted 
by comparison with expressions familiar in Jewish folk- 
lore. Some of these are preserved in the apocryphal 
gospels. Thus, in the Pseudo-Matthew, Levi, the 
teacher of Jesus, astounded by the Child's learning, 
says, "I think he was born before the flood." In the 
gospel of Thomas, the teacher Zacchseus says, ''This 
child is not of earthly parents, he is able to subdue even 
fire. Perhaps he was begotten before the world was 
made." These ideas, which correspond somewhat to 
the Teutonic superstition of the "changeling," are trace- 
able in the Fourth Gospel (viii. 56-59), where Jesus is 
stoned for saying, "Before Abraham was I am." 

It will be seen that by this early writer "to the He- 



SOLOMON MELCHIZEDEK. 1 63 

brews" Jesus was not thought of in connection with 
David, but bore Solomon's preeminent title, King of 
Peace, and that conferred on him by the Queen of 
Sheba, King of Justice. In the "Wisdom of Solomon" 
the Prince of the Golden Age, historically associated 
with idolatrous shrines, had been rehabilitated, even 
apotheosized; he was now a sort of rival of Jesus in 
divine sonship. The writer of our Epistle therefore 
artistically, not to say artfully, utilizes a composite 
word made into a proper name under which Solomon's 
combined royalty and priesthood, his peace and justice, 
had been detached from his personality and personified. 
The new exaltation of Solomon personally was thus 
ignored, while his essential glories, his wisdom, and his 
reclaimed virtues, were woven into the celestial mantle 
of mysterious Melchizedek, and through him passed to 
the shoulders of the risen Christ. 



CHAPTER XV. 

THE PAULINE DEHUMANIZATION OF JESUS. 

The Queen of Sheba certainly deserved her exalta- 
tion as the Hebrew Athena, and the homage paid to 
her by Jesus, for journeying so far simply to hear the 
wisdom of Solomon. In Jewish and Christian folklore 
are many miraculous tales about the Queen's visit, 
but in the Biblical records, in the books of "Kings" and 
"Chronicles," the only miracle is the entire absence of 
anything marvellous, magical, or even occult. The 
Queen was impressed by Solomon's science, wisdom, 
the edifices he had built, the civilization he had brought 
about; they exchanged gifts, and she departed. It is 
a strangely rational history to find in any ancient annals. 

The saying of Jesus cited by Clement of Alexandria, 
"He that hath marvelled shall reign," uttered perhaps 
with a sigh, tells too faithfully how small has been the 
interest of grand people in the wisdom that is "clear, 
undefiled, plain." They are represented rather by the 
beautiful and wealthy Marchioness in "Gil Bias," whose 
favour was sought by the nobleman, the ecclesiastic, the 
philosopher, the dramatist, by all the brilliant people, 
but who set them all aside for an ape-like hunchback, 
with whom she passed many hours, to the wonder of 
all, until it was discovered that the repulsive creature 
was instructing her ladyship in cabalistic lore and 
magic. 

164 



DEHUMANIZATION OF JESUS. 1 65 

There is much human pathos in this longing of mortals 
to attain to some kind of real and intimate perception 
beyond the phenomenal universe, and to some personal 
assurance of a future existence; but it has cost much 
to the true wisdom of this world. Some realization of 
this may have caused the sorrow of Jesus at Dalma- 
nutha, as related in Mark. "The Pharisees came forth 
and began to question with him, seeking of him a sign 
from heaven, testing him. And he sighed deeply in his 
spirit, and saith. Why does this people seek a sign? I 
say plainly unto you no sign will be given them. And 
he left them, and reentering the boat departed to the 
other side." 

They who now long to know the real mind of Jesus 
are often constrained to repeat his deep sigh when they 
find the most probable utterances ascribed to him per- 
verted by the marvel-mongers, insomuch that to the 
protest just quoted Matthew adds a self-contradictory 
sentence about Jonah. That this unqualified repudia- 
tion by Jesus of miracles should have been preserved at 
all in Mark, a gospel full of miracles, is a guarantee of 
the genuineness of the incident, and of the comparative 
earliness of some parts of that gospel. The period of 
sophistication was not far advanced. Miracles require 
time to grow. But the deep sigh and the words of 
Jesus, taken in connection with the entire absence from 
the Epistles — the earliest New Testament documents — 
of any hint of a miracle wrought by him, is sufficient to 
bring us into the presence of a man totally different 
from the "Christ" of the four Gospels.* 

Those who seek the real Jesus will find it the least part 
of their task to clear away the particular miracles 

* The name Jesus is used in these pages for the man, Christ being used 
for the supernatural or risen being. 



1 66 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

ascribed to him ; that is easy enough ; the critical and 
difficuh thing is to detach from the anecdotes and 
language connected with him every admixture derived 
from the belief in his resurrection. To do this com- 
pletely is indeed impossible. 

Paul, probably a contemporary of Jesus, knew well 
enough the vast difference between the man ''J^sus" 
and the risen "Christ" ; he insisted that the man should 
be ignored, and supplanted by the risen Christ, as re- 
vealed by private revelations received by himself after 
the resurrection. The student must now reverse 
that: he must ignore those post-resurrectional revela- 
tions if he would know Jesus "after the flesh" — that is, 
the real Jesus. 

In an age when immortality is a familiar religious 
belief we can hardly realize the agitation, among a peo- 
ple to whom life after death was a vague, imported 
philosophy, excited by the belief that a man had been 
raised bodily from the grave. Immortality was no 
longer hypothesis. If to this belief be added the further 
conviction that this resurrection was preliminary to his 
»j>eedy reappearance, and the world's sudden trans- 
formation, a mental condition could not fail to arise in 
which any ethical or philosophical ideas he might have 
uttered while "in the flesh" must be thrown into the 
background, as of merely casual or temporary impor- 
tance. Such is the state of mind reflected in the Pauline 
Epistles. In them is found no reference whatever to 
any moral instructions by Jesus. And when after some 
two generations had passed, and they who had expected 
while yet living to meet their returning Lord had died, 
those who had heard oral reports and legends concern- 



DEHUMANIZATION OF JESUS. 167 

ing him and his teachings began to write the memoranda 
on which our Synoptical Gospels are based, it was too 
late to give these without adulterations from the apos- 
tolic ecstasy. His casual or playful remarks were by 
this time discoloured and distorted, and enormously 
swollen, as if under a solar microscope, by the over- 
whelming conceptions of a resurrection, an approaching 
advent, a subversion of all nationalities and institutions. 
The most serious complication arises from the extent 
to which the pretended revelations of Paul have been 
built into the Gospels. The so-called ''conversion of 
Paul" was really the conversion of Jesus. The facts 
can only be gathered from Paul's letters, the book of 
**Acts" being hardly more historical than ''Robinson 
Crusoe." The account in "Acts" of Paul's "conver- 
sion" is, however, of interest as indicating a purpose in 
its writers to raise Paul into a supernatural authority 
equivalent to that ascribed to Christ, in order that he 
might set aside the man Jesus. The story is a travesty 
of that related in the "Gospel According to the He- 
brews," concerning the baptism of Jesus : "And a voice 
out of the heaven saying, 'Thou art my beloved Son, in 
thee I am well pleased' : and again, 'I have this day 
begotten thee.' And straightway a great light shone 
around the place. And when John saw it he saith to 
him, 'Who art thou. Lord?' " John fell down before 
Jesus as did Paul before Christ. "At midday, O King, 
I saw on the way a light from heaven, above the bright- 
ness of the sun, shining round about me, and them that 
journeyed with me. And when we were all fallen to the 
earth, I heard a voice saying to me in the Hebrew 
language, 'Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? It is 



1 68 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

hard for thee to kick against the goad.' And I said, 
'Who art thou, Lord?' " (Precisely what John said to 
Jesus at the baptism.) 

This story (Acts xxvi. 13-15), quite inconsistent with 
Paul's letters, is throughout very ingenious. Besides 
associating Paul with the supernatural consecration of 
Jesus, it replies, by calling him Saul, to the Ebionite 
declaration that Paul had been a pagan, who had become 
a Jewish proselyte with the intention of marrying the 
High Priest's daughter. There is no reason to sup- 
pose that Paul was ever called Saul during his life, and 
his salutation of two kinsmen in Rome with Latin 
names, Andronicus and Junias (Romans xvi. 7), ren- 
ders it probable that he was not entirely if at all Hebrew. 
The sentence, 'Tt is hard for thee to kick against the 
goad," is a subtle answer to any who might think it 
curious that the story of the resurrection carried no con- 
viction to Paul's mind at the time of its occurrence by 
suggesting that in continuing his persecutions he was 
going against his real belief — kicking against the goad. 

Paul, however, knows nothing of this theatrical con- 
version in his letters. But in severe competition with 
other ''preeminent apostles," who were preaching "an- 
other Christ" from his, he pronounces them accursed, 
supporting an authority above theirs by declaring that 
he had repeated interviews with the risen Christ, and on 
one occasion had been taken up into the third heaven 
and even into Paradise ! The extremes to which Paul 
was driven by the opposing apostles are illustrated in 
his intimidation of dissenting converts by his pretence 
to an occult power of withering up the flesh of those 
whom he disapproves ( i Cor. v. 5 ) . He tells Timothy 
of two men, Hymenoeus and Alexander, whom he thus 



DEHUMANIZATION OF JESUS. ' 1 69 

"delivered over to Satan" that "they may be taught not 
to blaspheme" — the blasphemy in this case being the 
belief (now become orthodoxy) that the dead were not 
sleeping in their graves but passed into heaven or hell 
at death. In the book of "Acts" (xiii.) this claim of 
Paul's seems to have been developed into the Evil Eye 
(which he fastened on Bar Jesus, whose eyes thereon 
went out), and may perhaps account for the similar 
sinister power ascribed to some of the Popes. 

In this story of Bar Jesus, Christ is associated with 
Paul in striking the learned man blind (xiii. 11), and 
the development of such a legend reveals the extent to 
which Jesus had been converted by Paul. In i Cor. ii. 
he presents a Christ whose body and blood, being not 
precisely discriminated in the sacramental bread and 
wine, had made some participants sickly and killed 
others, in addition to the damnation they had eaten and 
drank. He does not mention that any who communi- 
cated correctly had been physically benefited thereby; 
only the malignant powers appear to have had any 
utility for Paul. 

That this menacing Christ may have been needed to 
intimidate converts and build up churches is probable ; 
that such a being was nothing like Jesus in the flesh, 
but had to come by pretended posthumous revelation, 
as an awful potentate whose human flesh had been but 
a disguise, is certain. We need not, therefore, be sur- 
prised to find that nearly everything pharisaic, cruel, 
and ungentlemanly, ascribed to Jesus in the synoptical 
Gospels, is fabricated out of Paul's Epistles. Paul 
compares rival apostles to the serpent that beguiled 
Eve (2 Cor. xi. 3, 4), and Christ calls his opponents 
ofiPspring of vipers. The fourth Gospel, apostolic in 



170 • SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

Spirit, degrades Jesus independently, but it also borrows 
from Paul. Paul personally delivered some over to 
Satan, and the intimation in John xiii. 27, ''after the 
sop, then entered Satan into Judas," accords well with 
what Paul says about the unworthy communicant eating 
and drinking damnation (i Cor. xi. 29). 

The Eucharist itself was probably Paul's own adapta- 
tion of a Mithraic rite to Christian purposes. There is 
no reason to suppose that there was anything sancti- 
monious in the wine supper which Jesus took with his 
friends at the time of the Passover, and Paul's testimony 
concerning the way it had been observed is against any 
over with you?"* Had it been other than a pleasant 
Epiphanius from the Gospel according to the Hebrews 
show that he desired to draw his friends away from 
the sacrificial feature of the festival : "Where wilt 
thou that we prepare for the passover to eat ?" . . . 
''Have I desired with desire to eat this flesh, the pass- 
over with you?"t Had it been other than a pleasant 
wine supper it could not in so short a time have become 
the jovial festival which Paul describes (i Cor. xi. 20), 
nor, in order to reform it, would he have needed the 
pretence that he had received from Christ the special 
revelation of details of the Supper which he gives, and 
which the Gospels have followed. Having substituted 

* About 1832 the Rev. Ralph Waldo Emerson notified his congregation 
in Boston (Unitarian) that he could no longer administer the " Lord's Sup- 
per," and near the same time the Rev. W. J. Fox took the same course 
at South Place Chapel, London. The Boston congregation clung to the 
sacrament, and gave up their minister to mankind. The London congrega- 
tion gave up the sacrament, and there v/as substituted for it the famous oouth 
Place Banquet, which was attended by such men as Leigh Hunt, Mill, 
Thomas Campbell, Jerrold, and such women as Harriet Martineau, Eliza 
Flower, Sarah Flower Adams (who wrote "Nearer, My God, To Thee"). 
The speeches and talk at this banquet were of the highest character, and the 
festival was no doubt nearer in spirit to the supper of Jesus and his friends 
than any sacrament. 

t Dr. Nicholson's " The Gospel According to the Hebrews, p. 60. In all 
of my references to this Gospel I depend on this learned and very useful 
work. 



DEHUMANIZATION OF JESUS. 171 

a human for an animal sacrifice ("our passover also 
hath been sacrificed, Christ," i Cor. v. 7), he restores 
precisely that sacrificial feature to which Jesus had 
objected; and in harmony with this goes on to show 
that human lives have been sacrificed to the majestic 
real presence (i Cor. xi. 30). He had learned, per- 
haps by "pagan" experiences, what power such a sacra- 
ment might put into the priestly hand.* 

It is Paul who first appointed Christ the judge of 
quick and dead (i Tim. iv. i). He describes to the 
Thessalonians (2 Thes. i.) "the revelation of the Lord 
Jesus from heaven with the angels of his power in flam- 
ing fire, rendering vengeance to them that know not 
God," and the "eternal destruction" of these. Hence, 
"I never knew you" becomes a formula of damnation 
put into the mouth of Christ. "I know you not" is the 
brutal reply of the bridegroom to the five virgins, whose 
lamps were not ready on the moment of his arrival. 
The picturesque incidents of this parable have caused 
its representation in pretty pictures, which blind many 
to its essential heartlessness. It is curious that it should 
be preserved in a Gospel which contains the words, 
"Knock, and it shall be opened unto you : for every one 
that asketh receiveth, and he that seeketh findeth, and 
to him that knocketh it shall be opened." The parable 
is fabricated out of i Thes. v., where Paul warns the 
converts that the Lord cometh as a thief in me night, 
that there will be no escape for those who then slumber, 
that they must not sleep like the rest, but watch, "for 
God hath appointed us not unto wrath." 

* It has always been a condition of missionary propagandism that the 
new religion must adopt in some form the popular festivals, cherished ob- 
servances and talismans of the folk. It will be seen by i Cor. x. 14-22 that 
Paul's eucharist was only a competitor with existing eucharists, with their 
"cup of devils,'' as he calls it. 



172 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

The Christian dogma of the unpardonable sin, sub- 
stituted for the earlier idea of an unrepentable sin, was 
developed out of Paul's fatalism. He writes, "For this 
cause God sendeth them a strong delusion that they 
should believe a lie" (2 Thes. ii). Although this is not 
connected in any Gospel with the inexpiable sin, we find 
its spirit animating the Paul-created Christ in Mark 
iv. 11: "Unto them that are without all these things 
are done in parables, that seeing they may see and not 
perceive, and hearing they may hear and not under- 
stand : lest at any time they should be converted, and 
their sins should be forgiven them." This is imported 
from Paul (Rom. xi. 7, 8) : "That which Israel seeketh 
for, that he obtained not ; but the elect obtained it and 
the rest were hardened ; according as it is written, God 
gave them a spirit of stupor, eyes that they should not 
see, and ears that they should not hear, unto this very 
day." 

Whence came this Christ who, in the very chapter 
where Jesus warns men against hiding their lamp under 
a bushel, carefully hides his teaching under a parable 
for the express purpose of preventing some outsiders 
from being enlightened and obtaining forgiveness ? 

Jesus could not have said these things unless he 
plagiarized from Paul by anticipation. Deduct from 
the Gospels all that has been fabricated out of Paul 
(I have given only the more salient examples) and there 
will be found little or nothing morally revolting, nothing 
heartless. Superstitions abound, but so far as Jesus is 
concerned they are nearly all benevolent in their spirit. 

But even after we have removed from the Gospels 
the immoralities of Paul and the pharisaisms so pro- 
found as to suggest the proselyte, after we have turned 



DEHUMANiZATION OF JESUS. 1 73 

from his Christ to seek Jesus, we have yet to divest him 
of the sombre vestments of a supernatural being, who 
could not open his lips or perform any action but in 
relation to a resurrection and a heavenly office of which 
he could never have dreamed. Was he 

"The faultless monster whom the world ne'er saw"? 

Did he never laugh? Did he eat with sinners only 
to call them to repentance? Did he get the name of 
wine-bibber for his "salvationism," — or was it because, 
like Omar Khayyam, he defied the sanctimonious and 
the puritanical by gathering with the intellectual, the 
scholarly, the Solomonic clubs? 

To Paul we owe one credible item concerning Jesus, 
that he was originally wealthy (2 Cor. viii. 9), and as 
Paul mentioned this to inculcate liberality in contribu- 
tors, it is not necessary to suppose that he alluded to his 
heavenly riches. At any rate, the few sayings that may 
be reasonably ascribed to Jesus are those of an educated 
gentleman, and strongly suggest his instruction in the 
college of Hillel, whose spirit remained there after his 
death, which occurred when Jesus w^as at least ten years 
old. 

To a pagan who asked Hillel concerning the law, 
he answered : ''That which you like not for yourself 
do not to thy neighbour, that is the whole law ; the rest 
is but commentary." It will be observed that Hillel 
humanizes the law laid down in Lev. xix. 18, where the 
Israelites are to love each his neighbour among '*the 
children of thy people" as himself. Even Paul (Rom. 
xiii. 8, Gal. v. 14) quotes it for a rule among the believ- 
ers, while hurling anathema on others. But Jesus is 
made (Matt. vii. 12) to inflate the rule into the imprac- 
ticable form of ''All things whatsoever ye would that 



174 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

men should do unto you, even so do ye also unto them." 
By which rule a wealthy Christian would give at least 
half his property to the first beggar, as he would wish 
the beggar to do to him were their situations reversed. 
This might be natural enough in a community hourly 
expecting the end of the world and their own instalment 
in palaces whose splendour would be proportioned to 
their poverty in this world. But when this delusion faded 
the rule reverted to what Hillel said, and no doubt Jesus 
also, as we find it in the second verse of ''Didache/' 
the Teaching of the Tzvelve Apostles. It is a prin- 
ciple laid down by Confucius, Buddha, and all the 
human ''prophets," and one followed by every gentle- 
man, not to do to his neighbour what he would not like 
if done to himself. But it is removed out of human 
ethics and strained ad ahsurdum by the second-advent- 
ist version put into the mouth of Jesus by Matthew. 
I have dwelt on this as an illustration of how irrecover- 
ably a man loses his manhood when he is made a God. 

Irrecoverably I In the second Clementine Epistle 
(xii. 2) it is said, "For the Lord himself, having been 
asked by some one when his kingdom should come, 
said, When the two shall be one, and the outside as the 
inside, and the male with the female neither male nor 
female." Perhaps a humorous way of saying Never. 
Equally remote appears the prospect of recovering the 
man Jesus from his Christ-sepulchre. Even among 
rationalists there are probably but few who would not 
be scandalized by any thorough test such as Jesus is 
said, in the Nazarene Gospel, to have requested of his 
disciples after his resurrection, ''Take, feel me, and see 
that I am not a bodiless demon!" Without blood, 
without passion, he remains without the experiences and 



DEHUMANIZATION OF JESUS. 175 

faults that mould best men, as Shakespeare tells us ; 
he so remains in the nerves where no longer in the intel- 
lect, insomuch that even many an agnostic would shud- 
der if any heretic, taking his life in his hand, should 
maintain that Jesus had fallen in love, or was a married 
man, or had children. 



CHAPTER XVI. 

THE MYTHOLOGICAL MANTLE OF SOLOMON FALLEN 

ON JESUS. 

It is no part of my aim to prove miracles impossible, 
nor to consider whether one or another alleged wonder 
might not be really within the powers of an exceptional 
man. In the absence of any apostolic allusion to any 
extraordinary incident in the life of Jesus, and his own 
declaration ( for the evangelists could not have invented 
a rebuke to their own narratives) that miracles were 
the vain expectation of a people in distress and degrada- 
tion, such records have lost their historic character. 
As Gibbon said in the last century, it requires a miracle 
of grace to make a believer in miracles, and even among 
the uncritical that miracle is not frequent. In the New 
Testament belief in miracle has its natural corollary in 
a miraculous morality, — a dissolution of earthly ties, a 
severance from worldly affairs, a non-resistance and 
passiveness under wrongs, which are in perfect accord 
with persons moving in an apocalyptic dream, but not 
with a world awakened from that dream. 

But at the root of the unnatural miracles is the natural 
miracle — the heart of man. We are such stuff as 
dreams are made on, as the miracle-working poet re- 
minds us ; our little life is surrounded with a sleep, a 
realm of dreams, — visions that give poetic fulfilment to 
hopes born of hard experience. Na biblical miracle in 

176 



SOLOMON AND JESUS. 1 77 

its literal form is so beautiful and impressive as the his- 
tory of its origin and development as traced by the stu- 
dent of mythology. The growth, for example, of a 
simple proverb ascribed to Solomon ''He that trusteth 
in his riches shall fall, but the just shall flourish as a 
green leaf" into a hymn (Ps. Hi.) ; the association of 
this Psalm, by its Hebrew caption, with hungry David 
eating the shewbread of the temple, and the king's 
slaying the priests who permitted it ; the use of this 
legend by Jesus when his disciples were censured for 
plucking the corn on the Sabbath (with perhaps some 
humorous picture of a great king in Heaven angry 
because hungry men ate a few grains of corn, crumbs 
from his royal table) pointed with advice that the cen- 
sors should learn that God desires charity and not sacri- 
fice; the development of this into an early Christian 
burden against the rich, which took the form of an old 
Oriental fablcj'^to which a Jewish connotation was given 
by giving the poor man in Paradise the name of Lazarus 
(i. e. Eleazar, who risked his life to obtain water for 
famished David, a story that may have been referred to 
by Jesus along with that of the shewbread) ; the trans- 
formation of this parable into a quasi-historical narra- 
tive representing the return of Lazarus from Abraham's 
bosom, his poverty omitted ; the European combination 
of the parable and the history by creating a St. Lazarus 
(''one helped by God"), yet appointing him the helper 
of beggars (laszaroni) : these items together represent 
a continuity of the human spirit through thousands of 
years, surmounting obstructive superstitions, holding 

* Ormazd entrusted Zoroaster for seven days with omniscience, during 
which time he saw, besides many other things, " a celebrity with much 
wealth, whose soul, infamous in the body, was hungrv and jaundiced and in 
hell, . . and I saw a beggar with no wealth and helpless and his soul was 
thrivin:-? in paradise."— i^a>7w«« Vast. Sacred Books of the East, Vol. V, 
p. 197. 



17S SOLOMONIC LITERATURE, 

still the guiding thread of humanity through long laby- 
rinths of legend. 

To fix on any one stage in such an evolution, detach 
it, affirm it, is to wrest a true scripture to its destruction. 
Few can really be interested in Abimelech and the 
shewbread ; no one now believes that a rich man must 
go to hell because he is rich, nor a pauper to Paradise 
because of his pauperism; and none can intelligently 
believe the narrative of the resurrection of Lazarus 
without believing that in Jesus miraculous power was 
associated with the unveracity and vanity ascribed to 
him in that narrative. But take the legends all to- 
gether, and in them is visible the supersacred heart of 
humanity steadily developing through manifold sym- 
bols and fables the religion of human helpfulness and 
happiness. The study of mythology is the study of 
nature. 

The theory already stated {^anie I), that illegitimacy 
or irregularity of birth was a sign of authentication for 
"the God-anointed," finds some corroboration in the 
claim of the Epistle to the Hebrews that Jesus, like 
Melchizedek, was without father, mother, or genealogy. 
His double nature is suggested : "Our Lord sprung 
out of Judah" (vii. 14), yet (verse 16), as priest, he 
has arisen "not after the law of a carnal commandment, 
but after the power of an indissoluble life." The writer 
admits that what he writes about Melchizedek is "hard of 
interpretation," and perhaps it so proved to the genealo- 
gist (Matt, i.) who apparently was animated by a desire 
to make out a carnal-law inheritance of the throne, yet 
not so legitimate as to exclude divine interference at 
various stages. In the forty-two generations only five 
mothers are named, — all associated either with sexual 



SOLOMON AND JESUS. 179 

immorality or some kind of irregularity in their matri- 
monial relations. Tamar, through whose adultery with 
her father-in-law, Judah, his almost extinct line was pre- 
served, is already a holy woman in the book of Ruth (iv. 
12), and the association there of Ruth's name with this 
particular one of the many female ancestors of her son, 
and her mention in Matthew, look as if some editor of 
Ruth as well as the genealogist desired to cast suspicion 
on her midnight visit to Boaz. "The Lord gave Tamar 
conception, and she bore a son" — grandfather of David. 
It is also doubtful whether Rahab, who comes next to 
Tamar in Matthew's list, is called a harlot in the book 
of Joshua : Ziineh is said to mean "hostess" or "tavern- 
keeper." But in the Epistle to the Hebrews and in that 
of James she becomes a glorified harlot. The next 
female ancestor of Jesus mentioned is "her of Uriah." 
The name of the woman is not given, — ^the important 
fact being apparently that she was somebody's wife. 
Our translators have supplied no fewer than five words 
to save this text from signifying that Bathsheba was still 
Uriah's wife when Solomon was born. 

The next ancestress named after the mother of Solo- 
mon is the mother of Jesus, Mary, in whom Bathsheba 
finds transfiguration. The exaltation of the adulterous 
mother of Solomon has already been referred to (ante 
II.), and the traditional ascription to her of the author- 
ship of the last chapter of Proverbs. She was also 
supposed to be the original or model of "the Virtuous 
Woman" therein portrayed ! Now, in that same chap- 
ter she is pronounced "blessed," and excelling all the 
daughters who have done virtuously (Cf. Luke i. 28, 
42). In the "Wisdom of Solomon" (ix. 5) a phrase is 
used by Solomon which is also used by his mother 



l8o SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

(Bathsheba) when she conjured from David the decree 
for his succession, — "thine handmaiden" (i Kings i.). 
Solomon says, "For I, thy servant, and son of thy hand- 
maiden," etc. This was written in a popular work 
about the time of the birth of Jesus. We find the 
"blessed" of Proverbs xxxi. 28, and the "handmaiden" 
of the "Wisdom of Solomon" both in Mary's magnifi- 
cat: "For he hath regarded the low estate of his hand- 
maiden ; for behold, from henceforth all generations 
shall call me blessed." 

In Ecclesiasticus (xv. 2) we find the enigmatic clause 
concerning Solomonic "Sophia," personified Wisdom : 

xai U7ra'^Tij(T£Tac adroi w^ fj.yJTrjp^ y.ai ojc; yuvi] Tcapdevlaq irpoi^Si- 
ierai ahrov. 

The Vulgate translates : "Ft obviabit illi quasi mater 
honorificata, et quasi mulier a virginitate suscipiet 
ihum." 

Wycliffe translates the Vulgate : "And it as a modir 
onourid schal meete hym, and as a womman fro vir- 
gynyte schal take him." 

The Authorised Version has : "And as a mother 
shall she meet him, and receive him as a wife married 
of a virgin." 

In the Variorum Teacher's Bible the reading "maiden 
wife" is suggested, and reference is made to Leviticus 
xxi. 13, "And he shall take a v/ife in her virginity." 
But the Septuagint, which Jesus Ben Sira would follow 
were he quoting, uses simple words there : olxoc; yvmi- 

xa Tzapdivov \lx rou yivooq auroo^ XTJiperai. 

(The words in crochets are added by the LXX.) 
The clause in Ecclus. xv. 2, taken with the chapter it 
continues, conveys to me an impression of rhaosodical 
paradox, as when Dante apostrophises Mary : "O Vir- 



SOLOMON AND 7BSUS. l8l 



y 



gin Mother, daughter of thy son !" The Semitic god- 
dess is born, Wisdom, sister of virginal Athena of the 
Parthenon, yet fulfilHng the Solomonic exaltation of 
the Virtuous Woman, who is also a wife. She is there- 
fore the Virgin Bride. 

But whether this interpretation Is correct or not, it 
cannot be doubted that this strange phrase in a house- 
hold book might easily convey that impression, and that 
to believers in the resurrection of Jesus the feeling that 
he must also have entered the world in a supernatural 
way might naturally have associated Miriam his mother 
with the virgin bride, Wisdom. 

The evolution of Wisdom into the Holy Spirit has 
been traced (^ante XIL), and it is sufficient to men- 
tion here that in the "Gospel according to the Hebrews," 
Jesus uses the phrase "My mother the Holy Spirit." 

In the "Wisdom of Solomon" the resurrected Solo- 
mon says, "I was nursed in swaddling clothes, and that 
with cares" (vii. 4, cf. Luke ii. 7). This might be said 
of every babe, but the King, having begun by saying 
"I myself also am a mortal man," mentions the swad- 
dling clothes as a sign of lowliness ; and the impression 
made by this item in the Birth-legend of Jesus is shown 
by a passage in the Arabic Gospel of the Infancy. It 
is said that when the Wise Men came, in obedience to a 
prophecy of Zoroaster, Mary rewarded their gifts with 
one of the child's "Swaddling bands," which on their 
return to their own land withstood the power of fire, 
in which it was tested. 

The infant Jesus receives gifts of the Wise Men, 
traceable to the gold, silver, and spices brought by the 
Queen of Sheba (afterwards "Sophia") to Solomon. 
(Cf. also Psalm Ixxii. 8-1 1.) As Solomon to the 



f82 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

Queen, so Jesus gives proofs of astounding wisdom 'to 
the woman of Samaria. 

In the ''Wisdom of Solomon" the returned king pro- 
ceeds : "I was a witty child, and had a good spirit. 
Yea rather, being good, I came into a body undefiled" 
(viii. 19, 20). In Luke it is said, "And the child grew, 
and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom." "And 
Jesus increased in wisdom and stature." 

The word "undefiled" was a special title of Wisdom. 
In the "Wisdom of Solomon" (vii.) the King, having 
described his birth, "like to all," and his "swaddling 
clothes," follows this immediately by saying, "I prayed, 
and understanding was given me; I called, and the 
spirit of Wisdom came to me." This is the new and 
the spiritual birth. Among the titles ascribed in the 
same chapter to Wisdom is "Undefiled," this being 
emphasized three verses lower by the declaration that 
being a pure emanation from God "no defiled thing can 
fall into her." These ideas, so far as Solomon is con- 
cerned, are referable to his prayer for wisdom ( i Kings 
iii. 9) and to Jahveh's adoption of him (Psalm ii. 7). 
"Thou art my son, this day have I begotten thee." 

These ideas all reappear at the baptism of Jesus, as 
related in the "Gospel according to Hebrews" : 

"Behold the mother of the Lord and his brethren said to 
him, 'John the Baptist baptizeth for remission of sins : let 
us go and be baptized by him.' But he said to them, 'Wherein 
have I sinned that I should go and be baptized by him? except 
perchance this very thing that I have said is ignorance.' And 
when the people had been baptized Jesus also came and was 
baptized by John. And as he went up the heavens were 
opened, and he saw the Holy Spirit in shape of a Dove descend" 
ing and entering him. And a voice out of heaven, saying, 
'Thou art my beloved Son, in thee I am well pleased' ; and 



SOLOMON AND JESUS. 183 

again, 'I have this day begotten thee.' " (Cf. Jahveh's promise 
concerning Solomon, i Chron. xvii, 13, "I will be his father 
and he shall be my son.") 

It is important to recall that this all occurred before 
baptism. The suggestion that he should be baptized for 
remission of sins, is met by Jesus as a challenge of his 
sinlessness. It is submitted to the test, and before he 
enters the water the "Undefiled" (the dove) enters him, 
and the deity announces him as then and there begotten. 
When "straightway a great light shone around the 
place" — ultimately the Star of Bethlehem. John the 
Baptist is here the shepherd : seeing the light, he asks, 
"Who art thou, Lord?" The heavenly voice replies, 
"This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." 
Then John fell down before him and said, "I pray thee. 
Lord, baptize thou me." But he prevented him, saying, 
"Let be ; for thus it is becoming that all things should 
be fulfilled." Then follows the baptism, and the ac- 
count continues : 

"And it came to pass, when the Lord had come up from the 
water, the entire fountain of the Holy Spirit descended and 
rested upon him and said to him, 'My Son, in all the prophets 
did I await thee, that thou mightest come and I might rest 
in thee ; for thou art my rest ; thou art my first-born Son that 
reignest forever.' "* 

The phrase "entire fountain of the Holy Spirit" is 
Parsi. Anahita is the Holy Spirit ; her influence is 
always described-as a fountain descending on the saints 
or heroes to whom she gives strength. It will be re- 
membered that in this Gospel the Holy Spirit is also 
feminine. The use of the words "fountain" and "rest 
in thee" are interej^ting in connection with the account 
of John the Baptizer and Jesus in the fourth gospel, 

* Nicholson's " Gos/rel According- to the Hebrews,^^ pp. 36-43. 



184 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE, 

which differs so widely from the Synoptical narratives. 
It is in John (iii.) left doubtful whether Jesus accepted 
any baptismal rite at all. John was baptizing at a large 
pool called ^non-by-Saleim, — probably allegorical, 
meaning ''Fountain of Repose." Jesus and his friends 
came there and plunged in (i^aTrrc^uvro) ,, but they 
seem to have been a distinct party from that of John. 

After the supposed resurrection of Jesus everything 
he did, even taking a bath, became mystical. Jerome 
says that in his time there was a place called Salumias, 
arbd he maintained that it was there that Melchizedek 
refreshed Abraham. There are various readings of 
this Saleim in the New Testament, all, no doubt, vari- 
ants of Solomon, all meaning ''rest" ; and the fourth 
Gospel supplies in ^Ahwv iyyuq laX-qix^ the basis of the 
legend in the Aramaic Gospel of the "rest" which the 
Holy Spirit found in her son, on whom her "entire 
fountain" was poured. And with this legend may also 
be read the words of "Wisdom of Solomon," vii. 2^, 
28: "She (Wisdom) maketh all things new; and in all 
ages entering into holy souls she maketh them friends 
of God and prophets. For God loveth none but him 
that dwelleth with Wisdom." The representation in 
this Aramaic Gospel of the Holy Spirit as "entering 
into" Jesus is especially interesting in connection with 
the use of the same phrase in "Wisdom of Solomon," 
— into whose heart Wisdom was put by God ( i Kings 
X. 24). 

It is only after Wisdom has entered into Jesus that 
the voice is heard, "This is my beloved Son, in thee I 
am well pleased." This accords with Solomon's words, 
"God loveth none but him that dwelleth with Wisdom." 
The angelic song at the birth (Luke ii. 14) preserves 



SOLOMON AND JESUS. 1 85 

the heavenly voice at the baptism concerning "peace." 
The ''peace" is Solomon's own name, associated with 
the "rest" given to his reign in order that he might 
build the temple (i Kings v. 4, Ecclesiasticus xlvii. 13). 
"My Son," says the spirit from within Jesus, "Thou art 
my rest." 

It is remarkable that the title preeminently belonging 
to Solomon, "Prince of Peace," and unknown to the 
Gospels as a title of Jesus, should be traditionally given 
to one said to have declared that he had come on earth 
to bring not peace but a sword, and bids his disciples 
arm themselves. No doubt the religious instinct tells 
true in this ; it is tolerably plain that the warlike words 
were ascribed to Jesus not because he said them, but 
to adapt him to the "Word" as described in the "Wis- 
dom of Solomon" : "While all things were in quiet 
silence. . . . thine Almighty Word leaped down from 
heaven out of thy royal throne as a fierce man of war 
. . . and brought thine unfeigned commandment as a 
sharp sword," etc. The fierce metaphor was, as we 
have seen, caught up and spiritualized in the Epistle to 
the Hebrews, and passed on to be literalized for the 
risen Christ, so that the consecration of the sword by 
the Prince of Peace is writ large in the Christian wars 
of many centuries. 

To the tests and proofs of Solomon's wisdom re- 
corded in I Kings iii. and x. many additions were made 
by rabbinical tradition, mostly derived from Parsi scrip- 
tures. The famous Ring of Solomon is the symbol of 
sovereignty over the part of the earth owned by God 
given by him to the first man King Yima — "Then I, 
Ahura Alazda, brought two implements unto him, a 
golden ring and a poniard inlaid with gold. Behold, 



1 86 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

here Yima bears the royal sway!" (Vendidad, Farg. 
ii. 5). When Yima pressed the earth with this ring, 
the genius of the Earth, Aramaiti, responded to his wish 
and order. The ring represented Yima's ''glory" (in 
Avestan phrase), his divine potency, lost when he 
yielded to a temptation of the devil, and Solomon also 
lost his ring with which, as we have seen {^ante IV.) 
his "glory" and royal sway passed to the (Persian) 
devil Asmodeus. This occurred in a trial of wits, 
Asmodeus propounding hard questions, which Solomon 
was able to answer until, proudly thinking he could 
answer by his unaided intellect, he laid aside his ring, 
at the challenge of Asmodeus. These hard questions 
are found in an ancient legend of a similar contest be- 
tween the devil and Zoroaster, and are alluded to as 
"malignant riddles." Zoroaster met the devil "un- 
shaken by the hardness of his malignant riddles," and 
swinging "stones as big as a house," whicn he had 
obtained from the Maker, — tables of the divine law, 
and possibly origin of the stones which the devil chal- 
lenged Jesus to turn into bread. 

There are Avestan elements in the legend of the temp- 
tation of Jesus that do not appear in the legends of Solo- 
mon. In Parsi belief the land of demons on earth is 
Mazana. From that region they issue to inflict diseases, 
especially blindness and deafness. In that region is an 
"exceeding high mountain," Damavand, to which the 
great demon Azi Dahaka was bound by Feridun who 
overcame him. This demon was called "the murderer," 
— the epithet mysteriously applied by Jesus to the devil 
(John viii. 44). After tempting and supplanting King 
Yima he ruled over the world for a millennium in great 



SOLOMON AND JESUS. 187 

splendour, and the chief of devils tempts Zoroaster 
with that glory. 

"Renounce the good law of the worshippers of 
Mazda, and thou shalt gain such a boon as the Murderer 
gained, the ruler of nations." Thus in answer to him 
said Zoroaster, "No, never will I renounce the good 
law of the worshippers of Mazda, though my body, my 
life, my soul, should burst." Again said the guileful 
one, the Maker of the evil world, "By whose word wilt 
thou strike, by whose word v^ilt thou repel, by whose 
weapon will the good creatures (strike and repel) my 
creation?" Thus, in answer, said Zoroaster, "The 
sacred mortar, the sacred cup, the Haoma [the sacra- 
mental juice] the Words taught by Mazda, these are my 
weapons."* 

After this, Zoroaster *'on the mountain" conversed 
with Ahura Mazda, and invoked the beneficent beings 
who preside over the seven Karshvares of the earth. 
We thus have here the mountain, the stones, the Word 
from the mouth of God, the offer of the kingdoms of the 
world, and the ministering angels, which reappear in 
the temptation of Jesus. 

After his baptism, Jesus repudiates his human parent- 
age ("who is my mother?" etc.), and was led up by his 
new mother — the Spirit — into the wilderness to be 
tested by the devil. To this no doubt relate the words 
of Jesus preserved by Origen from the "Gospel accord- 
ing to the Hebrews" : "J^st now my mother the Holy 
Spirit took me by one of my hairs and bore me up on 
the great mountain Tabor."** Here the Solomonic 

* Sacred Books of the East, Vol. iv, p. 206. 

** In the apocryphal book, " Bel and the Dragon" (verse 36), the angel 
thus bore by the hair Habakkuk to Babylon, and set him over the lion's den 
where Daniel was confined. Habakkuk means the " embrace of love." 



1 88 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

kingdom and glory were offered by the devil if Jesus 
would worship him. According to Luke iv. he was 
tempted forty days (the number of the years of Solo- 
mon's reign). The first incident thereafter was his 
announcement that the Spirit of the Lord was upon him, 
and the second was an exhibition of his Solomonic 
power over devils. This, in Luke, is his first miracle. 
His first titular recognition was this surrender of the 
devil, who cried, 'T know thee who thou art, the Holy 
One of Israel !" 

In Matthew also the devils first give him the divine 
title "Son of God" (vii. 29). In the next chapter he 
gives his twelve disciples authority over demons. That 
this was well understood by the people is shown in 
Matthew xii. 23, where, on seeing demons mastered, 
they cry, 'Ts this the Son of David?" that is, is this 
Solomon, the famous enslaver of demons ? 

It may be noted in passing that in the three miracles 
in Matthew of exorcising a blinding demon the title 
''Son of David" is used. Alford speaks of this as re- 
markable; but vision is the especial promise of Wis- 
dom, therefore of Solomon, son of David. 

It may be remembered in this connection that in 
''Wisdom" (Ecclus. iv.) the trial by Wisdom is set 
forth : 

"Whoso giveth ear unto her shall judge the nations. * * * 
If a man commit himself unto her, he shall inherit her, 
* * * At the first she will walk with him by crooked ways 
and bring fear and dread upon him, and torment him with her 
discipline, until she may trust his soul, and try him by her 
laws. Then she will return the straight way unto him, and 
comfort him, and shew him her secrets. But if he go wrong 
she will forsake him, and give him over to his own ruin." 



SOLOMON AND JESUS. 1 89 

This, which reappears in the parable of the broad and 
the narrow ways, seems to have determined the part 
which the Holy Spirit performs in the temptation of 
Jesus. According to Matthew he was by the Spirit 
carried involuntarily, "driven,'* says Mark, the Hebrew 
Gospel says, "borne by the hair" into the wilderness : as 
Jahveh "raised a Satan unto Solomon," and left Job to 
Satan, the Holy Spirit carries Jesus to Satan, the same 
Evil One ; and after his triumph the promise in "Wis- 
dom" (she will "comfort him") is fulfilled: "Angels 
came and ministered unto him." Luke says he "re- 
turned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee; and a 
fame went out concerning him through all the region 
round about : he taught in their synagogues and was 
glorified of all." 

Nevertheless it may be remarked that the peculiar 
language in Luke (iv. i) "led in the spirit" suggests 
that the whole story is a late literalization of some vis- 
ion, partly based on v. 7 of the Epistle to the Hebrews, 
but originally on Solomon's dream (i Kings iii.), in 
which Jahveh offers him any gift, and he asks only for 
Wisdom. Or, as he (Solomon) says in "Wisdom of 
Solomon," "I preferred her before sceptres and thrones" 
(vii. 8). But all of these were remotely influenced by 
the trial of Zoroaster, and the attempts of the devil to 
terrify Zoroaster before tempting him may be hinted in 
Mark i. 13, "He was with the wild beasts." These, 
however, are more prominent in the temptation of 
Buddha. 

Paul appears to have considered it an important 
apostolic credential to have had to contend with a Satan 
(2 Cor. xii. 7-10), and Peter was honoured by a special 



190 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

request made by Satan, and conceded, that he should 
be for a time under his diaboHcal control. (Luke 
xxii. 31.) 

As in the case of Solomon, the tests and trials of the 
superhuman wisdom and power of Jesus are found 
chiefly in tradition and folklore. The apocryphal gos- 
pels contain many, and some are preserved by Persian 
and Arabian poets. In the New Testament a few 
examples appear in which his utterances are given 
a quasi- judicial tone. There are several points of 
resemblance between the famous judgment of Solomon 
on the two harlots contending for the child, and the 
sentence of Jesus in favour of "sinful Mary," sister of 
Martha, accused by Simon the Pharisee. In both cases 
the decision was made at a feast, and in favour of the 
one who "loved much." It is not, however, the inci- 
dent in itself that is now referred to, but only the for- 
mality ascribed to it in the narrative. And this adheres 
to the entire story. The anointing of Jesus may have 
occurred, but the scenic touches recall lines in the Solo- 
monic "Song of Songs" : 

"While the King sat at his table, 
My spikenard sent forth its fragrance." 

It is not impossible, by the way, that it was from 
chaste Shulamith of the Song ascribed to Solomon that 
a bad reputation was fixed on Mary Magdalene, against 
whose virginal purity no word is said in the Bible, the 
chapter heading to Luke vii. alone identifying her, 
in contradiction to John xi. 2, as the woman who 
anointed Jesus. This libel seems to come from a far 
antiquity, — as far probably as the Talmudic "Miriam 
Magdala" (i. e., Braided-hair Mary) ; and this epithet 
might have been derived from Shulamith's "ringlets" 



SOLOMON AND JESUS. 191 

which were ''tied up in folds," and whose spikenard 
sent forth its odours while Solomon was at the table. 
The later Jahvism must have considered such attention 
by ladies to their hair as an evidence of wickedness. 
Paul, while recognizing that long hair is a woman's 
"glory" (i Cor. xi.) dangerously fascinating even to 
the angels, testifies against "braided hair" (i Tim. ii.), 
an instruction repeated in i Peter iii. Whether this 
lady of means who helped to support Jesus was from 
Magdala or not, it is nearly certain that her legend was 
derived from another sense of "Magdalene," and it is 
not improbable that the friendship of Jesus for her was 
in keeping with his Solomonic defiance of the Pharisaic. 
The Eastern tales of monarchs in disguise, derived 
from a legend of Solomon, may have prepared the 
popular mind for the double role performed by Jesus 
in the Gospels, for the earlier writers do not suggest any 
lowliness in his position beyond the humiliation of tak- 
ing on human flesh and dying. In the Gospels we find 
him now an hungered, now dining with the Pharisee 
and anointed with precious ointment, again multiplying 
food ; an humble son of man who has not where to lay 
his head, a son of God with legions of angels at his 
command ; purifying the temple with violence, and 
predicting its destruction ; a peacemaker bringing a 
sword ; telling his disciples to resist not evil, and arm- 
ing them ; enjoining secrecy about his miracles, pres- 
ently parading them ; prostrate with anguish in a 
garden, presently shining with unmasked splendour. 
Solomon never arrayed himself in any such brilliant 
raiment as that of the transfiguration, nor was his 
environment finer than the scenes imaged in some of 
these parables, — the prodigal's ring and robe, the king 



192 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

going to war and sending his ambassadors, the masters 
of fields and vineyards, the momentous wedding dress, 
the importance of rank and precedence at a feast. In 
miracles, too, we have the grand wedding at Cana, and 
the homage of the centurion deferentially rewarded* 

In the Hebrew Gospel Jesus says, "I will that ye be 
twelve apostles for a testimony to Israel" ; with which 
we may compare the "twelve officers over all Israel" 
appointed by Solomon (i Kings iv. 7). In Mark the 
first bestowal on Jesus of his Solomonic title "Son of 
David" (x.) is immediately followed by his Solomonic 
entry into Jerusalem. In Matthew the blind man's 
tribute is followed by the cry of multitudes, "Hosanna 
to the Son of David" ; and the whole scene is obviously 
from the narrative in i Kings i. of the procession of 
Solomon, seated on David's mule, on the occasion of 
the anointing which made him the model Messiah, in 
virtue of which he was King and Priest in combination. 
Solomon dedicated the temple himself, as High Priest, 
and to him, as King-Priest, the privilege of sanctuary 
was subordinate. Wherefore he had an offender exe- 
cuted while holding the horns of the altar. The titular 
Son of David, on the morrow of his triumphal entry, 
assumes authority in the temple, and scourges out of 
it the sellers of things used in the sacrifices, — especially 
Doves. These his human mother had sacrificed after 
his birth for purification, but by this time they symbol- 
ized his divine mother, the Holy Spirit, and were not 
to be sold. 

Who can suppose that this violence, which were as if 
one assaulted those who sell holy candles and pictures in 

* I observed in the play at Oberammergau that while the disciples were 
barefoot, Jesus wore fine white silk stockings, and was otherwise in richer 
costume. 



SOLOMON AND JESUS. 193 

a church vestibule, really occurred ? At Oberammergau 
the whole tragedy of the Passion Play hinges on the 
resentment of these merchants, who appeal to the San- 
hedrim for protection from the violence of one man 
armed wkh a whip ! The story (John ii.) is an epitaph 
of the primitive Christ, the value of whose blood was its 
proof that his victory over the Adversary was that of a 
Man, unaided by a divine, unblemished by a carnal, 
weapon : triumph by either would have been defeat. 

The bread and wine offered to Abraham by the 
mythical king-priest of Salem (Solomon disguised as 
Melchizedek) may have been suggested by the bread 
and wine offered by Wisdom to her guests, in Proverbs 
ix. However this may be, there is clearly discoverable 
at the Last Supper of Jesus the Satan that Jahveh raised 
up against Solomon in the presence of mythical Judas 
("Satan entered into him," says John), and in the 
whole scene the table of Wisdom. "She hath mingled 
her wine, she hath furnished her table," and cries — 

"Come, eat ye of my bread, 
And drink of the wine which I have mingled." 

That Jesus supped with his disciples, at the Passover 
time, is very probable, but that the bread and wine alone 
should have been selected for symbolical usage (a point 
unknown to the fourth gospel) conforms too closely 
with the Solomonic prologue to be a mere coincidence. 
The words "Take, eat," "Drink ye all of it," recall also 
the Song of Songs — 

Eat, O friends ! 

Drink, yea abundantly, O beloved ! 



CHAPTER XVII. 

THE HEIR OF SOLOMON'S GODHEAD. 

The anger of Jahveh against Solomon (i Kings xi.) 
is, of course, the outcome of late theological explana- 
tions of how the ancient and much idealised kingdom 
could have been divided after divine promises of its pro- 
tection. The interview with Solomon is a sort of 
dramatization, in which the anachronism of making 
Jahveh a historic contemporary of the Wise King repre- 
sents the fact that when the tribal deity was evolved it 
was in antagonism to a Solomon who, though his body 
had long mouldered, was still "marching on." That 
Solomon had to contend with the hard and fanatical 
elements afterwards consolidated in Jahvism is pretty 
clear, and we may see in him a primitive Akbar. A cen- 
tury after Akbar 's death the Rajah of Joudpoor said to 
the emperor Aurungzebe : ''Your ancestor Akbar, 
whose throne is now in heaven, conducted the affairs 
of his empire in equity and security for the period of 
fifty years. He preserved every tribe of men in repose 
and happiness, whether they were followers of Jesus 
or of Moses, of Brahma or Mohammed. Of whatever 
sect or creed they might be, they all equally enjoyed his 
countenance and favour, insomuch that his people, in 
gratitude for the indiscriminate protection which he 
afforded them, distinguished him by the appellation of 
The Guardian of Mankind." Moslem fanaticism 
could not tolerate such toleration, and Akbar's reign 

194 



THE HEIR OF SOLOMON'S GODHEAD. 195 

was followed by conflicts very similar to those which 
followed Solomon's reign, leading to the Mogul empire, 
but ultimately to the reign of an "Empress of India," 
under whom we now see the same toleration of all reli- 
gions which prevailed in the fifty years of Akbar. 

The Moslem saw in Akbar's liberality and toleration 
the supreme offence of putting other gods — Jesus, 
Brahma, Ahuramazda — beside Allah. The Jahvist saw 
retrospectively in Solomon's liberality the putting of 
Moloch, Ashera, and other gods beside Jahveh. It was 
therefore recorded that Jahveh determined to rend all 
the tribes "save one from Solomon's son (a vaticinium ex 
evento). But that one was enough to preserve the 
Solomon cult. 

'A'ydyy.Tj oude Seat [idyovraL. This Necessity, which the 
Greeks saw w^orking above all the gods, is man himself, 
and worked also above Jah and Jahvism, nay, by means 
of them. Gradually they seemed to prevail over Solo- 
monism. The Proverbs and Solomonic Psalms were 
transfused with Jahvism, but by this process the 
heavenly and the terrestrial kings were confused, and 
the idea of a human heir to the throne of Jahveh was 
conceived. As when, in our own era, Islam swallowed 
Zoroaster, with the result of bringing forth the great 
literary age of Persia, with Parsaism rationalized under 
a transparent veil of Moslem phrase and fable, so an- 
ciently arose the Hebrew Faizis and Saadis and Omar 
Khayyams, Of these was the Isaiah who, with pig- 
ments of the Solomonic sunset, painted the sunrise of a 
new day, and a new earth-born God. 

"Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the 
government shall rest on his shoulder ; and his name shall be 
called Counsellor of Wonders, God-hero, Father of Spoil, 



196 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

Prince of Peace. Enlarged shall be dominion, and without 
cessation of peace, on the throne of David, and throughout his 
kingdom, to establish it and uphold it by justice and righteous- 
ness from henceforth and forever." 

Every title, every tint, in this gorgeous vision is 
taken from the nuptial song for Solomon (Ps. xlv.) 
and Solomon's Psalm (Ixxii.) The "delightsomeness 
poured over (Solomon's) lips" (Ps. xlv. 2) makes the 
Counsellor of Wonders; his deification (verses 6, 7) 
makes the God-hero ; the tributes of Tarshish, and 
Sheba make him father of spoil (Ps. Ixxii.) ; his ''mild- 
ness" (Ps. xlv. 4) his abundant "peace" (Ps. Ixxii. 3, 
7) make the Prince of Peace; and the rest is a general 
refrain for both of the Psalms. 

Psalm xlv. opens with the words, "My verse concerns 
the King," and there is a fair consensus of the learned 
that the king is Solomon. It has been found impossible 
to fix upon any other monarch to whom the eulogia 
would be applicable, and the resemblance of the theme 
to the Song of Solomon proves that at an early period 
writers connected the Psalm with Solomon and one of 
his espousals. 

In quoting Professor Newman's translation of this 
Psalm {^anie II) I alluded to my slight alterations. 
These are few and verbal, but momentous, and were not 
made without consultation of many critical authorities 
and versions. Professor Newman was unable to believe 
that the poet really meant to address Solomon as God, 
and in verse 6 translates "Thy throne divine," in verse 
7, "Therefore hath God, thy God, etc." Others, with 
similar theistic bias, have shrunk from what, according 
to the balance of critical interpretation, is the clear sense 
of the original : 



THE HEIR OF SOLOMON'S GODHEAD. 197 

"Thy throne, O God, ever and always stands; 
A righteous sceptre is thy royal sceptre : 
Thou lovest right and hatest evil ; 
Therefore, O God, hath thy God anointed thee 
With oil of joy above thy fellow-kings." 

When these verses were written — and verse 1 1, where 
after Adonai the Vulgate has Elohim, '"He is thy Lord 
God, worship thou him" — the rigid Jewish monotheism 
did not exist ; and the apostrophe might have continued 
without special notice had not the psalm been included 
in the Jewish hymnology and thus given the solemnity 
and consecration ascribed by Jahvism to its canonical 
Book of Psalms. But ultimately it made a tremendous 
and even revolutionary impression ; and that the verses 
were interpreted as bestowing the divine name on Solo- 
mon, by those most jealous of that name, is proved, I 
think, by the following considerations : 

1. Isaiah, in his vision quoted above (Is. ix.) com- 
bines the phraseology of Ps. xlv. with that of Ps. Ixxii. 
(which bears Solomon's name as its author), and 
ascribes to a new-born child the title ''God-hero." 

2. The recently discovered original of a fragment of 
Ecclesiasticus includes the passage about Solomon in 
xlvii., and it is said in verse 18: ''Thou (Solomon) 
wast called by the glorious name which is called over 
Israel." This seems to be a plain reference to the 
ascriptions in Ps. xlv., where alone the divine name is 
applied to any individual mortal. Ecclesiasticus was 
compiled early in the second century before our era, 
and on the basis of much earlier compilations, as its 
prologue states. 

3. In the "Wisdom of Solomon" the monarch is rep- 
resented as a mortal who by the divine gift of super- 
natural Wisdom had gained immortality; he had be- 



198 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

come privy to the mysteries of God, was his Beloved, 
his Son. This was written about the first year of our 
era. 

4. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews trans- 
lates the Psalm xlv. as it is translated above, interpret- 
ing the words of deification as meant for the Firstborn 
of God at his ancient appearance on earth (i. 6), and 
applicable to his reappearance as Christ ; arguing from 
such language of deification the superiority of the Son 
of God over the angels, who were never so addressed. 

A court poet addresses a princely bridegroom as 
Elohim, as a god — as it were, an Apollo. Had more 
songs of like antiquity by poets of his race been pre- 
served, no doubt other instances of such rhapsody 
might be found, but it happens that this is the only 
instance in Hebrew literature where an individual man 
is clearly addressed as God (for Exod. vii. i and i Sam. 
xxviii. 13 are not really exceptions). As in the Psalm 
that is the only instance in which an individual man 
is, in the Old Testament, addressed as God, so is its 
application in the Epistle to the Hebrews the only 
indisputable instance in which an individual is 
addressed as God in the New Testament. 

"Thy throne, O God." Fateful words! The word 
of God, says this Epistle, is sharper than any two-edged 
sword, but its writer himself unwittingly unsheathed 
from a courtier's compliment just such a sword. One 
edge has slaughtered innumerable Jews, Moslems, Ari- 
ans, Socinians, mingling their blood with that of the 
humane Jesus himself on the sacrificial altar he tried so 
hard to exchange for mercifulness. The other edge 
turned against the moral heart of Jesus himself, low- 
ering the tone of all narratives and utterances ascribed 



THE HEIR OF SOLOMON'S GODHEAD. 199 

to him after his connection with Jahveh, and conse- 
quently lowering all Christendom under its dishonoura- 
ble burden of accommodating human veracity and kind- 
ness to the bad heavenly manners that were acquired 
by the deified Christ. For there was no other God to 
adopt him but a particularly rude one. 

Theological scholars who have compared the Epistle 
to the Hebrews with the Epistles of Paul have dwelt 
on the theological differences, but the moral differ- 
ences are greater. In the Epistle to the Hebrews the 
emphasis is laid on the service of Jesus to m.ankind : it 
is this that makes him, as it made Solomon, worthy of 
worship as a God, and the ancient God with his sacri- 
fices is virtually represented as transforming himself 
and his government to the measure of Jesus. Jesus is 
complete and perfect man, no part or power of his 
divine nature accompanying him on earth. But we see 
in Philippians ii. 7, and other passages, the primitive 
idea fading away, and Jesus pictured as a divine being 
in the mere semblance and disguise of a man, no real 
man at all ; a theory which prevails in the story of the 
transfiguration, where the disguise is for a moment 
thrown aside. The earlier idea of his genuine humanity 
was still strong enough to prevent any stories of mira- 
cles wrought by Jesus from arising, the resurrection 
being a miracle wrought by God after the work of 
Jesus was "finished," as he is said to have proclaimed 
from the stake. But legends of miracles became inevi- 
table after the theory of his disguise was diffused, and 
also stories of the vituperation, anathemas, and atti- 
tudinizings, which are so offensive in a man, but so 
characteristic of the whole history of Jahveh, with 
whom he was gradually identified. A gentleman does 



200 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

not call his opponents vipers and consign them to hell, 
but Jahveh is not under any such obligations. And, 
alas, disregard of the humanities did not, as we have 
seen, stop there even in Paul's time. In the further 
development, that of Jesus the magician, the personal 
character of Jesus was sadly sacrificed, and it is only 
due to the superstition that prevents the New Testa- 
ment narratives from being read in a common sense 
way that people generally are not shocked by some of 
the representations. 

When the second Solomon was born in Bethlehem, 
as the Gospel carols tell. Wise Men came to worship 
him, but Jahveh had already fixed his own star above 
the cradle, and his angels contended for the great man, 
as for centuries the wisdom of the first Solomon had 
been jahvized. It was, however, the opinion of some 
ancient commentators that the cry of the angels, ''Glory 
to God in the highest" meant that the birth of Jesus 
was to operate in the heavenly heights, and work 
changes there also. One may indeed dream of a deity 
longing for a human love, — grieving at being through 
ages an object of fear, personified as Wrath, — rejoicing 
in the birth of any new interpreter who should free him 
from the despot glory, "I create evil," and reconcile 
the human heart to him as eternal love — love ever bur- 
dened with the griefs of humanity, ever seeking to be 
born of woman, and to struggle against the dark and 
evil forces of nature. So one may dream, and it is a 
pathetic fact that the contention between humanity and 
heaven for the new-bom Saviour is traceable in vary- 
ing versions of the Angels' song. While half of Chris- 
tendom sing "On earth peace, good will toward men," 
the other half sing, "On earth peace to men of good 



THE HEIR OF SOLOMON'S GODHEAD, 20I 

will." Our Revisers find the balance of authorities on 
the side of authority, and translate 

Glory to God in the highest, 

And on earth peace among men in whom he is well pleased. 

Although the "higher criticism" appears to treat with 
a certain contempt the birth-legends and carols in Mat- 
thew and Luke, and the genealogies, beyoijd the letter 
of these is visible more of the vanishing Jesus ''after 
the flesh," the real and great man, than of the risen 
Christ in whom his humanity was lost. The "shepherd 
of my people," he who is to absolve them from their 
nightmare "sins," make crooked ways straight, rough 
places smooth, and free them from fear, is remembered 
in these rhapsodies of the Infancy, in the terrors of 
Herod, and gifts of the Wise. They have a certain 
evolution in the benevolent teachings and healing mira- 
cles of the Synoptics, easily discriminated from the 
competing Jahveh-Christ. (Think of a teacher urging 
his friends to forgive offenders seventy times seven 
and then promising them a "Comforter" who will never 
forgive the slightest offence, though merely verbal, 
either in this world or in the next ! ) 

The extent to which the man was lowered and lost 
in the risen Lord is especially revealed in the fourth 
Gospel. Except for the story of the woman taken in 
adultery, admittedly interpolated from another Gospel, 
the fourth Gospel may be regarded as perhaps the only 
book in the Bible without recognition of humanity. 
"I pray not for the world, but for those whom thou 
hast given me," is the keynote. In this work there is 
no text for the reformer and the philanthropist, unless 
perhaps the retreat of Jesus from a prospect of being 
made king. What inferences of benevolence might be 



202 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

made even from the miracles related have to be strained 
through the arrogance, self-aggrandizement, attitudi- 
nizing, as of a showman, with which they are wrought.* 
A rudeness to his mother precedes the turning of water 
to wine (ii. 4) ; the nobleman's son is healed because 
the aristocrat will not believe without a miracle (iv. 
48) ; the infirm man at Bethesda is healed only after 
a sham question, "Wouldest thou be made whole?" and 
threatened afterwards (v. 6, 14) ; feeding the multi- 
tude is attended with another sham question (vi. 5), 
and a parade of the fragments (13) ; the man born 
blind is declared to have been so born solely for the 
sign and wonder manifested in his cure (ix. 3). 

But the supremacy of a new Jahveh over all moral 
obligations and all truthfulness is especially displayed 
in the resurrection of Lazarus (xi.). Here Jesus is 
represented as staying away from the sick man, in order 
that he may die ; he affects to believe Lazarus is 
only asleep, but finding his disciples pleased with the 
prospect of recovery, in which case there would be no 
miracle, he becomes frank {Tzappr^dia) and assures 
them Lazarus is dead; he tells his disciples privately 
he is glad Lazarus is dead; he tells Martha, when she 
comes out to him alone, that her brother shall rise ; but 
when her sister Mary comes out, accompanied by her 
Jewish consolers, Jesus breaks out into vehement groans 
and lamentations, lashing himself [irdpa^ev iaurdv) 
into this sham grief over a man at whose death he has 
connived and who would presently be alive ! Even in 
his prayer over Lazarus the pretence is kept up, and 

*0n a veiT ancient sarcophagus in the Museo Gregoriano, Rome, is 
represented in bas-relief the raising of Lazarus. Christ appears beardless 
and equipped with a wand in the received guise of a necromancer, while the 
corpse of Lazarus is swathed in bandages exactly as an Egyptian mummy. — 
King's Gnostics, p. 145. 



THE HEIR OF SOLOMON'S GODHEAD. 203 

his Father is informed, in an aside, "I know that thou 
hearest me always, but because of the muhitude around 
I said it, that they may believe that thou didst send 
me." Thus does the fourth Gospel sink Jesus morally 
into the grave of Lazarus, leaving in his place an em- 
bodiment of the Jahveh who had lying spirits to send 
out into his prophets on occasion. 

The resurrection of Lazarus is a transparent fabrica- 
tion out of the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. 
Abraham's words to the rich man, — ''neither will they 
be persuaded if one rose from the dead," — were not 
adapted to a faith built on a resurrection, so that par- 
able is suppressed in the fourth Gospel. The resurrec- 
tion of a supernatural man is not quite sufficient for 
people not supernatural. Those who had been looking 
for a returning Christ had died, just like the unbeliev- 
ers. There was a tremendous necessity for an exam- 
ple of the resurrection of an ordinary man. Shocking 
as are the immoral details of the story, there is audible 
in it the pathetic cry of the suffering human heart, and 
the demand that must be met by any Gospel claiming 
the faith of humanity. "Lord, if thou hadst been here 
my brother had not died !" Through what ages has 
that declaration, not to be denied, ascended to cold and 
cruel skies? It is found in the Vedas, in Job, in the 
Psalms. If there is a Heart up there why are we tor- 
tured? To the many apologies and explanations and 
pretences which imperilled systems had given, Chris- 
tianity had to support itself by something more than 
Egyptian dreams and Platonic speculations. A dead 
man must arise; it must be done dramatically, amid 
domestic grief and neighbourly sympathy ; it must be 
done doctrinally, with funeral sermon turned to rejoic- 



204 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

ings. And this was all done in the story of Lazarus 
in such a way that it might surround every grave with 
illusions for centuries. For who, while tears are fall- 
ing, will pause to handle the wreaths, and find whether 
they are genuine ? Who, while the service is proceed- 
ing, will analyze the details, and ask whether it is possi- 
ble that the good Jesus could have practiced such decep- 
tion and assumed such theatrical attitudes?* 

The indifference of the fourth Gospel to such moral 
considerations as those found in the Synoptics is so 
apostolic that I am inclined to place much of it 
nearer to the first century than I once supposed. 
Paul's rage against the "wisdom of this world," 
and his fulminations against the learned because they 
are not "called," are fully adopted by the Johannine 
Christ, who says to the blind man whose eyes he had 
opened, and who was worshipping him: "For judg- 
ment came I into this world, that they that see not 
may see, and they that see may become blind." 
And these ideas are represented in a legend related in 
the book of Acts which is really allegorical, though our 
translators have m.anipulated it into serious history. 

A persecutor of Christians, on whom the spirit "came 
mightily," as on King Saul, so that he was a new "Saul 
among the prophets," sought to convert to his new 
faith a Roman Proconsul, Sergius Paul. But with this 
Consul was a learned man of the Jewish Wisdom 
School, Bar- Jesus Elymas, — i. e., Dr. Anti-Jesus Wise 
Man. Like Michael and Satan contending for the body 

* Renan suggested that Jesus and his friends at Bethany arranged a pre- 
tended death and resurrection of Lazarus. This seems inconsistent with 
the absence of any allusion to it or to Lazarus in the Epistles, and also 
with the evident relation of the narrative to the parable. It looks more as 
if the parable of Lazarus and the rich man had been dramatized and the 
return of Lazarus from "Abraham's bosom" added. At every step in the 
narrative( John xi.) there is a suggestion of some old "mystery-play'' fos- 
silized into prosaic literalism. 



THE HEIR OF SOLOMON'S GODHEAD. 205 

of Moses, Prophet Saul and Anti-Jesus Wise Man 
contended for the Roman Paul's soul. Prophet Saul 
prevailed by calling Anti-Jesus Wise Man a child of 
the devil, and striking him blind. Thereupon Consul 
Paul believed, being "astonished at the teaching of the 
Lord." Whereupon Prophet Saul triumphantly carries 
off the Roman's name as a trophy.* 

Beginning in this conclusive way, by striking human 
Wisdom sightless ("that they that see may become 
blind," John ix. 39), the Anti-Wisdom propaganda, 
which began with identifying W^isdom with the serpent 
in Eden, passed on to inspire the Church Fathers who 
gloated over the eternal tortures of the poets and phi- 
losophers of Greece and Rome. Alas for the philoso- 
phers not in their graves, but in their cradles, or in the 
womb of the future ! For torments are nearest "eter- 
nal" when they begin at once on earth. 

One may readily understand how it was that per- 
sonal traditions of Jesus and his teachings remained 
unwritten until his contemporaries were dead (although 
this may not have been the case with the suppressed 
"Gospel according to the Hebrews") ; the hourly ex- 
pected return of Christ rendered such memoirs unim- 
portant until it became clear that the expectation was 
erroneous. The age of John, of whom Jesus was 
rumoured to have predicted survival till his return 

♦This is the genuine sense of the story in Acts xiii. There is no evi- 
dence in Paul's writings that he ever bore the name of Saul. Bar-Jesus has a 
double meaning, — "Son of Jesus" and "Obstruction of Jesus." The anti- 
thesis mav have been suggested by the words of Pilate, in many ancient ver- 
sions of Matt, xxvii. 16, 17 : " Whether of the tv.'ain will ye that I release 
unto you? Jesus Bar Abbas, or Jesus that is called the Christ?" Elymas, 
commonly used as a proper name, means Wise Man. The word jJ-ayoi de- 
notes Wise Men in Matt. ii. j, where they bring gifts to the infant Christ, but 
the same word is made by translators to denote a "sorcerer" when the wise 
man is opposing Paul! Nobody named Sergius Pauhis wrs known before the 
Consul of AD. 94. who must have been long enough dead for this legend to 
form before it was written. 



2o6 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

(John xxi. 22), was stretched out to a mythical extent; 
he became an undying sleeper at Ephesus, and finally 
a pious ''Wandering Jew" ; but when at length such 
fables lost their strength, some imaginative imperson- 
ator brought forth an apocalyptic bequest of John post- 
poning the second advent a thousand years. The con- 
venticles had thus no resource but to turn into ortho- 
doxy the heresy of Hymenoeus and Alexander, for 
which Paul delivered them over to Satan, that the resur- 
rection occurs at death; to collect the traditional say- 
ings of Jesus ; and to adapt these to the new situation. 
A thousand years later, when the expected catastrophe 
did not occur, the substantial churches and cathedrals 
were built, as the Gospels had been built after the first- 
century disappointment. 

These Gospels contain things from which some of the 
real teachings of the wise man of Nazareth may be 
fairly conjectured. That the synoptical records are 
palimpsests, though denied by the prudent, is a truth 
felt by the unsophisticated who, in their use of such 
words as ''Christian" and "a Christian spirit," quite 
ignore the fearful anathemas and damnatory language 
ascribed to Jesus. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

THE LAST SOLOMON. 

Every race has a pride in its great men which ulti- 
mately prevails over any pious taboo imposed on them 
in life or by tradition. Some years ago it was an- 
nounced that a German scholar was about to publish 
proofs that Jesus was not of the Hebrew race, and while 
Christendom showed little concern, all Israel sat upon 
that German almost furiously. It is an old story. Ban- 
ished Buddha becomes an avatar of Vishnu, and his 
image now appears in India beside Jagenath. For the 
heresiarch must be adapted before adoption. So Solo- 
mon returns as a preacher of orthodox Jahvism, in the 
''Wisdom of Solomon," but so rigid had been the taboo 
in his case that the writer did not venture to insert the 
name of so famous a liberal and secularist. 

That was about the first year of our era. But pres- 
ently we hear about the "Son of David." Was that 
because of David himself? Interest in David had so 
receded that in the ''Wisdom of Solomon" the resusci- 
tated Wise Man barely alludes (once) to his "father's 
seat." Was it because of any popular interest in the 
legendary throne or house of David? That old "cov- 
enant" is not alluded to by the resuscitated monarch, 
and in the apostolic writings nothing is said about it. 
In the Gospels the title "Son of David" is generally 
connected with certain alleged miracles of Jesus, which 
recalled legends of Solomon, and it is only in the ac- 

207 



2o8 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

count of the entry into Jerusalem that it carries any 
connotation of royalty corresponding to the genealo- 
gies afterwards elaborated. Unless these narratives are 
accepted as historical they must be regarded as phe- 
nomena, and, taken in connection with what may be 
reasonably regarded as genuine teachings of Jesus, the 
phenomena point to a probability that he had reawak- 
ened interest in the Wise Man's teachings, and that this 
interest, by a compromise with Jahvist prejudices, 
coined the expression "Son of David" as an alms of 
Solomon. 

However this may be, it appears certain that there 
was in the teachings of Jesus some substantial recov- 
ery of the ancient and unconverted Solomon, the pro- 
verbial philosopher, the man of the world. How much 
Jesus may have said to revive interest in Solomon, and 
how many of his secular utterances have been hidden 
in the grave of his humanity, can only be conjectured; 
but there are two direct sayings concerning Solomon 
ascribed to him which may be regarded as the only un- 
reserved tributes to the Wise Man that had ever been 
uttered since his idealization in Chronicles. And our 
own Protestant Jahvism has tried so hard to manipulate 
these tributes into partial disparagements that we may 
easily imagine early Christian Jahvism destroying sim- 
ilar testimonies altogether. 

A. S. V. Luke xi. 31 : "The Queen of the South shall 
rise up in judgment with the men of this generation 
and condemn them : for she came from the uttermost 
parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and 
behold a greater than Solomon is here." 

True rendering: "The Queen of the South shall 
stand in the judgment with the men of this [Abra- 



THE LAST SOLOMON. 209 

hamic] brood, and condemn them ; for she came from 
the farthest parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of 
Solomon, and behold something more than Solomon is 

here." (/rAsT^/v ZoXo/xwvoq ojds ) 

The word mistranslated "greater," TtXelov^ is neuter 
and cannot be applied to a man. Jesus is not speaking 
of himself, but of the new Spirit animating a whole 
movement. 

The word "generation" as a translation of yevia 
is, in this connection, misleading. No one English 
word can convey the satire on people who regarded 
themselves as holy by generation from Abraham (cf. 
Luke iii. 8), which is in the vein of Carlyle's ridicule 
of English "Paper Nobility." Above these self-satis- 
fied claimants of inherited wisdom Jesus sets the Gen- 
tile Queen journeying to sit at the feet of Solomon. 
At the feet of Solomon Jesus also was sitting, and he 
certainly did not call himself personally greater than 
Solomon. 

The other allusion to Solomon (Matt. vi. 28, 29) is 
rendered thus : "Consider the lilies of the field, how 
they grow : they toil not, neither do they spin ; and yet 
I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was 
not arrayed like one of these." 

Here "glory," which when applied to a man has a 
connotation of pride and pomp, is made to translate 
do^^ which means honour in its best sense, as pre- 
served in "doxology." Jesus really says, "Solomon 
amid all his honours never arrayed himself {Ttepte^dksro) 
like one of these." The greatest and wisest of men 
did not affect display in dress.* 

* " Boast not of thy clothing and raiment, and exalt not thyself in the 
day of honor: for the works of the Lord (m nature) are wonderful, and his 
works among (urse) men are hidden."— Ecclus. xi. 4; cf., in same, xvi. 26-27, 
where it is said the beautiful things in nature ''neither labor, nor are weary* 
nor cease from their works." 



2IO SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

The apparent slightness of these EngHsh changes 
reveals their dehberate subtlety. Puritanism, taking its 
cue from King James's translators, has bettered the 
instruction, and steadily pictured Jesus pointing to a 
lily, — white emblem of purity, — and censuring (impli- 
citly) the ostentation of Solomon. Even in rational- 
istic hymn-books is found the pretty hymn of Agnes 
Strickland, beginning: 

"Fair lilies of Jerusalem, 

Ye wear the same array 
As when imperial Judah's stem 

Maintained its regal sway : 
By sacred Jordan's desert tide 

As bright ye blossom on 
As when your simple charms outvied 

The pride of Solomon." 

Very sweet ! But the "lilies of the field" in Palestine 
are not "fair," their charms are not "simple" ; they are 
large and gorgeous combinations of red and gold ; and 
Solomon, so far from being proud in the contrast, "out- 
vied" in simplicity the pride of the lily. 

Jesus may not indeed have said these things concern- 
ing Solomon, but the probability that he did say some- 
thing of the kind is suggested by the adroit mistransla- 
tions. The same puritanical spirit, the same prejudice 
against human wisdom and love of beauty, prevailed 
even more when the Gospels were written. The Jah- 
vist jealousy of the wisdom of the world which in a 
Targum added to Jeremiah ix. 23 a fling at Solomon, — 
"Let not Solomon the Son of David, the Wise Man, 
glory in his Wisdom,' — screamed on in Christian an- 
athemas on science, and laudations of the silly. (For 
"silly" is of pious derivation, from German selig — 
blessed.) Solomon had not been named in any canon- 



THE LAST SOLOMON. 211 

ical scripture for centuries, and even in apocryphal 
"Wisdom" (Ecclesiasticus) he appears as if a brilHant 
but fallen Lucifer. The cult of Solomon continued no 
doubt, in a sense, among the Sadducees (respectfully 
treated, by the way, by Jesus), but they were com- 
paratively few, and like the rationalists of the English 
Church, cautious about outside heresies. It was prob- 
ably characteristic that their name is derived from Sol- 
omon's priest, Zadok, instead of from Solomon himself. 
As for the Gentile Queen, she is not named in the Bible 
after the record of her visit to Solomon until the homage 
of Jesus was given her. It appears, therefore, very 
unlikely that such homage and the unqualified tributes 
to Solomon, would have been put into the mouth of 
Jesus. 

But why, it may be asked, were not these tributes 
suppressed? There is in one case a recognition of a 
Gentile lady which would recommend the text to the 
writer of Luke, and in the other a lesson against lux- 
ury which would recommend this to all believers. At 
any rate, whatever may have been the suppressions, 
and no doubt there were many, two of the Gospels 
have preserved these sentences, which, so far as the 
glorious "idolator" is concerned, neither of them would 
have invented. There are the words ; somebody uttered 
them; and the question arises, who was that daring 
man who broke the severe silence or reservations of 
centuries and did honour to the king who built shrines 
to gods and goddesses ?* 

^ * Ewald compares the omission of the name of Moses for so many cen- 
turies with the omission of Solomon's name. {Geschichte des Volkes Israel, 
Bk. ii.). Such omissions do not, he says, cast doubt on the historic character 
of either. The descriptive references to Solomon durinar the time when his 
name is suppressed are more continuous, and more historical. The utter- 
ance of Solomon's name was probably at first avoided through Jahvist hor- 
ror of his supposed idolatry and worldliness, but as he was addressed in 



212 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

As Solomon said, "A man is proved by what he 
praises." That Jesus did appreciate the greatness of 
the Solomonic literature is not a matter of conjecture. 
The sayings ascribed to him in the Gospels — apart from 
Pauline importations and quotations from Jahvist scrip- 
tures — are largely pervaded by the spirit and even by 
the phraseology of the Solomonic books. Remember- 
ing that the phrases ''kingdom of heaven," "kingdom of 
God," are post-resurrectional, and that Jesus could not, 
unless by miraculous foresight, use those phrases for 
any external dominion connected with himself, there 
is reason to believe that his conception was of a sway 
of Wisdom, and that Wisdom was to him the Saviour, 
as to Jesus Ben Sira, her realm "within," her leaven hid 
in the world, her advance without observation. 

Of course those who read the Bible in the light of a 
supernatural theory, see these things very differently, 
but considering the records as if they were those of 
uninspired people, one may say that some of the 
sayings ascribed to Jesus are, in their present form, 
meaningless. For example, what should we think if 
we found an ancient record of some poor Egyptian re- 
ported as saying, "Come unto me, all ye that labour 
and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take 
my yoke upon you, and learn of me ; for I am meek 
and lowly of heart: and ye shall find rest unto your 
souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light." 
How incongruous the "I am meek" with "learn of me" ! 
How could he give the heavy laden rest? And what 
rest ? what yoke ? But we would surely feel enlightened 
should we presently discover an Egyptian book of "Wis- 

a psalm as "God," and as superstitions about his demon-commanding 
power grew, it seems not improbable that there was some fear of using 
his name, akin to the fear of uttering the proper name of God or of any evil 
power. 



THE LAST SOLOMON. 213 

dom," with proof of its popularity when the mysterious 
words were orally repeated, containing such language 
as this from personified Wisdom : "Come unto me, all 
ye that be desirous of me, and fill yourselves with my 
fruits." And if we found in the same book a teacher 
saying : "I directed my soul unto Wisdom, and I found 
her in pureness. . . Draw near unto me, ye unlearned, 
and dwell in the house of Wisdom. . . Buy her for 
yourselves without money. Put your neck under her 
yoke, and let your life receive instruction : she is near 
at hand to find. Behold with your eyes that I have 
had but little labour, and have gotten unto me much 
rest." 

Here is sense. These are the words of Wisdom in 
Jesus Ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus xxiv. 19, h. 23-27). Can 
any unbiased mind fail to recognize in Matthew xi. 
28-30 a mangled quotation from this Hebrew book of 
the second century, before Jesus of Nazareth was born, 
but in his time cherished in many Jewish households 
as much as any Gospel is cherished in Christian house- 
holds? 

Consider the Sermon on the Mount. In the Proverbs 
ascribed to Solomon is found the beatitude pronounced 
by Jesus on the lowly, no doubt literally quoted by him : 
"With the lowly is wisdom" (Prov. xi. 2). The bless- 
ing of those who hunger for righteousness (justice) 
is in Prov. x. 24, where it is said their desire 
shall be granted. The blessing of the peacemakers is 
joy (Prov. xii. 20). The merciful man doeth good to 
his own life (Prov. xi. 17). The pure in heart shall 
have the King for his friend (Prov. xxii. 11). The 
house that stands and the house overthrown (Prov. 
x. 25 ; xii. 7 ; xiv. 1 1 ) ; the two ways (Prov. xii. 28, xiv. 



214 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

12, xvi. 17) ; the tree known by its fruits (Prov. xi. 
30, xii. 12) ; give and it shall be given you (Prov. 
xxii. 9) ; the sower (Prov. xi. 18, 24, 25) ; taking the 
lower place so as to be placed higher and not moved 
down (Prov. xxv. 6-8) ; searching for and buying Wis- 
dom as the precious silver, the pearl, the treasure (Prov. 
vi. II, 12, 17, 19, 35; XX. 15; xxiii. 23) ; the prodigal 
(Prov. xxix. 3) ; those who wrong parents (Prov. xx. 
20; xxviii. 24; cf. Matt. xv. 5; Mark vii. 11). The 
lamps of the wise and foolish virgins are found in 
Prov. xiii. 9 ; also xxiv. 20. 

In Proverbs xx. 9, we have the words, "Who can 
say, 'I have made my heart clean, I am pure from sin?' " 
In Ecclesiastes iii. 16, it is said, "Moreover, I saw under 
the sun, in the place of judgment, that wickedness was 
there; and in the place of righteousness that wicked- 
ness was there." (Cf. also vii. 20.) In the "Gospel 
according to the Hebrews" Jesus, declaring that an 
offender should be forgiven seventy times seven, adds : 
"For in the prophets likewise, after they were anointed 
by the Holy Spirit, utterance of sin was found." 

Although in the language ascribed to Jesus in the 
fourth Gospel (iii. i-io) there are post-resurrectional 
phrases, whatever he may have said about birth and 
about the wind-like spirit seems to have been what he 
expected Nicodemus, as a teacher in Israel, to under- 
stand. We may therefore suppose that it was substan- 
tially a quotation from Ecclesiastes xi. 5 : "As thou 
knowest not the way of the wind, nor the growth of the 
bones in the mother's womb, even so thou canst not 
fathom the work of God, who compasseth all things." 

In relation to Woman Jesus seems to have appealed 



THE LAST SOLOMON. 215 

to Solomon against Ecclesiastes, where (vii. 25-29) it 
is said : 

I have turned my heart to know, 

And to explore, and search out wisdom and the reason of 

things; 
And to know that wickedness is Folly, and Folly madness : 
And I have found what is more bitter than death — 
The Woman who is a snare, her heart nets, her hands chains : 
He who pleases God shall be delivered from her, 
But the offender shall be captured by her. 

See, this have I found (saith the Speaker). 
Adding one to another, to find out the account. 
Which I am still searching after, but have not found — 
One man in a thousand I have found, 
But a woman among all these I have not found. 
Look you, only this have I found — 
That God made man upright, 
But they have sought out many devices. 

In the first seven lines of this passage we may recog- 
nize the personification in Proverbs ix. 13-18. The 
Woman of the fifth line is "Dame Folly" ; but the last 
eight lines relate to womankind. The assurance in the 
eighth line that it is Koheleth who speaks raises a sus- 
picion that the last eight lines are commentary, — a. sus- 
picion further confirmed by the awkwardness of the 
writing. Strictly read, it is left uncertain whether no 
woman is ever captured by Dame Folly, or not one 
escapes. However, as commentators are generally men, 
the interpretation has been adverse to woman. 

But Jesus, perhaps remembering that Wisdom is as 
much a woman as Folly, is reported (Matthew xi. 19) 
to have said : "Wisdom is justified by her works." In 
Luke vii. 35 it is, "Wisdom is justified of all her chil- 
dren." Both of these readings appeal to the Solomonic 



2l6 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

portrait of the virtuous woman, in Proverbs xxxi. the 
last Hne of which says, ''Let her works praise her," and 
verse 28, "her children rise up and call her blessed." 

In Luke the sentence is a verse by itself, and the word 
"all" renders it probable that the sentiment has a bear- 
ing on the story that follows of the anointing of Jesus 
by a sinful woman.* Some such incident may have 
occurred, but the address to Simon the Pharisee making 
him to be the ofifender, and the woman one delivered 
from Dame Folly by her faith ("pleasing God") looks 
like a criticism on the "fling" at woman in Ecclesiastes, 
with a proverb taken for te^tt. This rebuke of the 
Pharisee, who thought "the prophet" ought to abhor 
the "sinner," immediately precedes an account of the 
eminent women who supported Jesus by their means, — 
Mary, called Magdalene ; Joanna, the wife of Herod's 
steward; Susanna, "and many others." They "minis- 
tered to him of their substance," and possibly the Phari- 
see and others might naturally suspect him of being 
among "the ensnared." The fact is strange enough to 
be genuine, and Luke thinks it important to say that 
Jesus had healed these ladies of bad spirits and infirmi- 
ties. Of course it is necessary to divest Gospel anec- 
dotes of much post-resurrectional vesture, and in this 
case it cannot be credited that Jesus said that the 
woman's sins were "many," which he could not have 
known, or that he gave her formal absolution. 

The indications of the study of Ecclesiasticus by Jesus 
are very remarkable. This book appears to have been 
a sort of nursery in which proverbs were trained for 
their fruitage in the last Solomon's religious testimo- 

* It is shocking to find this woman named as Mary Magdalene in the 
" Harmony of the Gospels," appended to the Revised Bible. 'J nis deliberate 
falsehood is carefully elaborated by separating the story as told in Matthew 
and Mark as another incident, under the heading, "Mary anoints Jesus." 



THE LAST SOLOMON, 217 

nies. What those testimonies were we cannot easily 
gather, but it is useful for comparative study to remark 
the sentences in Ecclesiasticus which correspond, either 
in thought or phraseology, with those ascribed to Jesus. 
The broad and the narrow ways barely suggested in 
''Proverbs" are here developed (Ecclesiasticus iv. 17, 
18). "Hide not thy wisdom" (iv. 23, xx. 30). "Say 
not, 'I have enough (goods) for my life' " (v. i, xi. 24). 
"Extol not thyself" (vi. 2). We find the exhortation to 
judge not (vii. 6) ; rebuke of much speaking in prayer 
(14) ; warning against the lustful gaze (ix. 5, 8) ; the 
night cometh when no man can work (xiv. 16-19; cf. 
Eccles. ix. 10) ; the proud cast down, the humble ex- 
alted (x. 14, xi. 5) ; one only is good (xviii. 2) ; swear 
not (xxiii.9) ; forgiven as we forgive (xxviii. 2) ; treas- 
ure rusting and treasure laid up according to the com- 
mandments of the Most High (xxix. 10, 11) ; "Judge 
of thy neighbor by thyself" (xxxi. 15) ; the altar-gift 
and the wronged brother (xxxiv. 18-20) ; he that seeks 
the law shall be filled (xxxii. 15) ; charity and not sac- 
rifice (xxxv. 2). 

These resemblances, of which more might be quoted, 
between teachings ascribed to Jesus and passages in 
the Wisdom Books, are so important that by the aid 
of these books some of the confused utterances attrib- 
uted to him may be made clear.* Apart from the 
importations of Paul, and one or two from the epistle 
to the Hebrews, no reference by the Jesus of the Gos- 

*In the newly-found tablet to which English editors give the title " Logia 
Jesou," the 5th " Logion," so far as it can be made out, reads: "... 
saith where there are . . . and there is one alone . . . I am with him. 
Raise the stone and there thou shalt find me, cleave the wood and there 
am I." The last sentence seems to be based on Eccles. x. 9: "Whoso re- 
moveth stones shall be hurt therewith; and he that cleaveth wood shall be 
endangered thereby." The first sentence may be an allusion to the poor 
man who alone saved the city (Eccles. ix.). There is no such word as "Jesus" 
in this " Logion," and perhaps it is Wisdom who speaks. 



2l8 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

pels to Jahvist books can be shown of similar sig- 
nificance. Combined as his Solomonic ideas are with 
his homage to Solomon and the Gentile Queen, and 
followed, as we shall see, by a resuscitation of Solo- 
monic legends in connection with him, it appears clear 
that Jesus was of the Solomonic and anti-Jahvist school. 

It would, however, be a great mistake to suppose that 
Jesus was simply a philosophical and ethical teacher. 
He cannot be so explained. The fragmentary sayings, 
so far as discoverable amid their post-resurrectional 
perversions, have the air of obiter dicta from a man en- 
gaged in a local propaganda of subversive principles. 
What the propaganda really was is but dimly discern- 
ible under its own subsequent subversion by his ghost, 
but there are a few sayings not traceable to his prede- 
cessors, and beyond the capacity of his contemporaries 
or his successors, which bring us near to an individual 
mind, and suggest the general nature of the agitation 
he caused. 

The story of the woman taken in adultery, known 
to have been in the suppressed "Gospel according to the 
Hebrews," and by some strange chance preserved in 
the fourth gospel (viii), I believe to have really oc- 
curred. It would have required a first-century Boc- 
cacio to invent such a story, and I cannot discover any- 
thing similar in Eastern or in Oriental books. Augus- 
tine says that some had removed it from their manu- 
'scripts, *T imagine, out of fear that impunity of sin was 
granted to their wives." It is not likely that any of 
the earlier fathers, any more than the later, would have 
invented so dangerous a story. 

Another anecdote, preserved only in the fourth Gos- 
pel, probably contains some elements of truth, namely, 



THE LAST SOLOMON. 219 

the words uttered to the Samaritan woman. Who 
would have been bold enough, even had he been liberal 
enough, to invent the words : "Neither in this moun- 
tain, nor in Jerusalem, shall ye worship the Father"? 
Even in the one Gospel that ventures to preserve it this 
noble catholicity is immediately retracted (John iv. 22) 
in a verse which obviously interrupts the idea. That 
the story is an early one is also suggested by the fact 
that no reproach to the woman on account of her many 
husbands is inserted. It is remarkable to find such a 
story related without any word about sin and forgive- 
ness. 

The so-called ''Sermon on the Mount" is well named : 
it is evidently made up of reports of sermons in ampli- 
fication of sayings of Jesus in the style of the Wisdom 
Books, among which probably were : 

Let your light shine before men. A lamp is not lit to be 

put under a bushel." 

"The lamp of the body is the eye. If thine eye be sound 

the whole body is illumined; if the eye be diseased the whole 

body is in darkness. If the inner eye be darkened how great 

is the darkness." 

"Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof." 

"By their fruits both trees and man are known." 

"Each tree is known by its own fruit." 

"Put not new wine into old wine-skins, lest they burst." 

"Be wise as serpents and harmless as doves." 

"Wisdom is justified by her children." 

"If any man will be great, let him serve." 

"The lowly shall be exalted, the proud humbled." 

"Blind guides stram out the gnat, and swallow a camel." 

"Give and it shall be given you." 

"The measure ye mete shall be measured to you." 

"Cast the beam from thine eye before noticing the mote in 

that of thy neighbour." 



220 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

The following sentences in the ''Gospel according to 
the Hebrews" do not appear to have been very seri- 
ously influenced by post-resurrectional ideas. 

"He is a great criminal who hath grieved the spirit of his 
brother." 

"No thank to you if you love them that love you, but there 
is thank if ye love your enemies and them that hate you." 
(Cf. Prov. xxix. 17, 29.) 

"Be ye never joyful save when you have looked upon your 
brother in charity." 

"Be as lambkins in midst of wolves." 

"The son and the daughter shall inherit alike." 

"It is happy rather to give than to receive." 

"No servant can serve two masters." 

"Out of entire heart and out of entire mind." 

"What is the profit if a man gain the entire world, and lose 
his life?" 

"Seek from little to wax great, and not from greater to 
become less." 

"Become proved bankers." 

"If ye have not been faithful in the little who will give you 
the great ?" 

These instructions have no connotations of the end 
of the world. They appear like the words of a man 
of the world, but not a man of the people. There is 
a certain unity in them, indicating a mind more devel- 
oped than the semi-Jahvist Alexandrian philosophers 
of the later Wisdom cult, as represented by Jesus Ben 
Sira's ''Wisdom,'* and by the "Wisdom of Solomon" ; 
also a mind more practical. 

But these wise sayings do not convey the full idea 
of a man whose execution the Sanhedrim would require, 
nor a man whose resurrection from the grave would 
be looked for by the populace. These two phenomenal 
facts imply some strong antagonism to the priesthood 
and their system. Martyrdoms do not occur for ethical 



THE LAST SOLOMON. 221 

generalizations, much less for philosophical affirma- 
tions. The faith that strikes deep is that which speaks 
in great denials. 

Trying to follow his advice to "Become proved bank- 
ers," we may detect in some probable sayings of Jesus 
a transitional ring, e. g., "The Sabbath was made for 
man, and not man for the Sabbath." The effort at 
self-emancipation is still more traceable in certain inci- 
dents related in the "Gospel according to the Hebrews" : 

"He saith, 'If thy brother hath offended in anything and hath 
made thee amends, seven times in a day receive him.' Simon 
his disciple said unto him, 'Seven times in a day?' The Lord 
answered and said unto him, *I tell thee also unto seventy 
times seven ; for in the prophets likewise, after that they were 
anointed by the Holy Spirit, utterance of sin was found.' " 

"The same day, having beheld a man working on the Sab- 
bath, he said to him, 'Man, if thou knowest what thou dost, 
blessed art thou : but if thou knowest not, thou art under a 
curse, and a law-breaker.' " 

That a man should regard the Holy Spirit as unable 
to make men infallible ; that he should have discovered 
immoral utterances in the prophets ; that he should re- 
gard it as a sign of enlightenment to disregard the Sab- 
bath deliberately and intelligently — this is surely all 
very striking. 

Who, in the second century, could have invented 
these anecdotes about Jesus? They are not harmoni- 
ous with the Pauline Epistles ; their heretical character 
is proved by the repudiation of the Gospel containing 
them, while their genuineness is implicitly confessed 
by the ultimate suppression of that Gospel. For surely 
it cannot be supposed that such a work, well known in 
the fifth century, was lost ; nor is there much doubt 
that any learned rationalist, if permitted the free range 



-222 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

of all the libraries in Rome, without the presence of 
polite librarians, could bring to light that first-century 
Gospel, the only one written in Aramaic, the language 
of Jesus. 

But, when we come to consider the mature and posi- 
tive teachings of Jesus, there may be placed in the 
front a sentence preserved from the suppressed Gospel 
by Epiphanius, who writes (Haer xxx. i6) : "And they 
say that he both came, and (as their so-called Gos- 
pel has it) instructed them that he had come to dis- 
solve the Sacrifices : 'and unless ye cease from sacri- 
ficing the wrath shall not cease from you.' " Dr. 
Nicholson is shocked at this threat, and suspects the 
Ebionites of having altered what Jesus said. But 
surely it is a true and grand admonition by one super- 
seding a phantasm of heavenly Egoism, demanding 
gifts from men for pacification, with the idea of a 
Father. Dr. Nicholson connects it, no doubt rightly, 
with Luke xiii. 1-3, which should probably read : 
''There were some present at that very season who told 
him of the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled 
with their sacrifices. And he answered. Think ye 
these Galileans were sinners rather than all other Gali- 
leans because they suffered these things? I tell you, 
No ! And unless ye cease from sacrificing, the Wrath 
will not cease from you." That is, they would always 
be haunted by the delusion of a bloodthirsty god, a 
god of Wrath, and see a judgment, not only in every 
accident, but in every calamity wrought by fiendish 
men. 

In his quotation from Hosea — "I desire charity, and 
not sacrifice" — Jesus speaks as if with a transitional 
accent, as compared with the declaration that sacri- 



THE LAST SOLOMON. 223 

fices imply deified Wrath. The contempt of Ecclesi- 
astes for "the sacrifice of fools who know not that 
they are doing evil" (v. i), has here become a great 
and far-reaching affirmation, which must have im- 
pressed the orthodox Jews as atheism. For, although 
there are passages in several psalms and in the prophets 
which disparage sacrifice, they were all interpreted by 
the Rabbins, as now by Christian theologians, as 
meaning their purification and spiritualization — by no 
means their abolition. Indeed, this higher interpre- 
tation of sacrifices appears to have given them fresh 
lease; and in the time of Jesus, when to the priest- 
hood remained only control over their religious ordi- 
nances, the sacrifices were apparently preserved with 
increased rigour. Jesus himself, unless the gospeller 
(Matt. v. 23, 24) has softened his language, had at 
one time only demanded that none should offer a gift 
at the altar until he had done justice to any who had 
aught against him. But a remarkable passage in the 
Epistle to the Hebrews (x. 5) represents Jesus as 
going to the world with a quotation from Psalm xl. 
6, 7, for a clause of which a parenthesis is given, saying : 

"Sacrifice and offering thou wouldst not 

(Thou hast furnished me this body) — 

In whole burnt offerings and sin offerings thou delighted not : 

Then said I (in that chapter of the book it is written for me), 

'Lo, I come to do thy will, O God.' " ^ 

The sentence preserved by Eusebius, however, shows 
that his attitude toward sacrifices was not merely to 
"lift" from men (Heb. x. 9, a^aipti) the burden of 
sacrifice, but to denounce it as an offering to the 
devil. "Unless ye cease from sacrificing, the Wrath 
shall not cease from you." 



2 24 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

In this sentence ''the Wrath" (7 opyri) is dearly a 
personification. It does not in the same form occur else- 
where in the Bible. Matthew and Mark report John 
the Baptist as speaking of ''the impending wrath," and 
Paul occasionally gives "Wrath" a quasi-personifica- 
tion (e. g., "children of Wrath," Eph. ii. 1-3). These 
expressions, and the "destroyer" Abaddon or Apollyon, 
of Revelations ix. and (xii. 12) the devil "in great 
temper" ( Ooixbv ), all show that the Jewish mind had 
become familiar with the idea of a dark and evil power 
quite detached from official relation to Jahveh, no 
longer "the wrath of God" executing divine judgments, 
but organized Violence, eager to afflict mankind as the 
creation of his enemy. 

In the "Wisdom of Solomon" (xviii.) there is a com- 
plete picture of the two opposing Destroyers. The 
divine destroyer ("thine Almighty Word") leaps down 
with his sword and slays the firstborn of Egypt; the 
antagonist Destroyer begins the same kind of work 
among the Israelites in Egypt, but Moses by prayer 
and the "propitiation of incense" sets himself ''against 
the Wrath" and overcomes him, — "not with physical 
strength, nor force of arms, but with a word." The 
incense used by Moses to put the demon to flight recalls 
the "perfume" used by Tobit, on the advice of the 
angel, to put to flight Asmodeus; and Asmodeus is 
notoriously the Persian Aeshma, a name meaning 
"Wrath," who occupies so large space in the Parsi scrip- 
tures.* The especial antagonist of Aeshma "of the 

* Asmodeus (identified as Aeshma by West, Bundahis xxv. 15, n. xo) has 
(Tobit vi. 13) slain seven men who successively married Sara, whom he (and 
Tobit) loved, and in Bundahis Aeshma has seven powers with which he will 
slay seven Kayan heroes. But one is preserved, as Tobit is. {Sacred Books 
of the East, Vol. V, p. 108.) Darmesteter says: "One of the foremost 
amongst the Drvants (storm-fiends), their leader in their onsets, is Aeshma, 
' the raving,' ' a fiend with the wounding spear.' Originally a mere epithet of 



THE LAST SOLOMON. 225 

wounding spear," is Sraosha, *'the incarnate Word, a 
mighty-speared god." (Farvardin Yast, 85.) As 
Moses overcomes "the Wrath" "with a word," Zo- 
roaster is given a form of words to conquer Aeshma 
("Praise to Armaiti, the propitious!") and the Ven- 
didad says, "The fiend becomes weaker and weaker at 
every one [repetition] of those words." The Zamyad 
Yast says, "The Word of falsehood smites, but the Word 
of truth shall smite it." Aeshma is the child of Ahri- 
man, the Deceiver of the World, and a Parsi would 
recognize him in the declaration ascribed to Jesus, "The 
devil is a liar and so is his father." (John viii. 44.) 

That Jesus regarded the whole realm of evil as abso- 
lutely antagonistic to the Good is reflected in the epistle 
"To the Hebrews." There his mission is to abolish the 
devil (ii. 14), which is very different from abolishing 
death (2 Tim. i. 10). For a long time the devil was 
suppressed in the "Lord's Prayer," but in that brief 
collection of Talmudic ejaculations the only original 
thing is, "Deliver us from the evil one." In the Clem- 
entine Homilies Jesus is quoted as having said, "The 
evil one is the tempter," and "Give not a pretext to the 
evil one." Nay, the single clause preserved in Matthew, 
that it is an enemy that sows tares, — these being as 
much parts of nature as corn, — is a sentence that divides 
the Ahrimanic creation from the Ahuramazdean crea- 
tion as clearly and profoundly as anything ascribed to 
Zoroaster. 

Theological harmonists have for centuries been at 
work on the contrarious doctrines of all scriptures, and 
even among the Parsis some kind of metaphysical alli- 

the storm fiend, Aeshma was afterwards converted into an abstract, the 
demon of rage and anger, and became an expression for all moral wickedness, 
a mere name of Ahriman." 



226 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

ance has taken place between the Kingdoms of Good 
and Evil. Devout Christians find it quite consistent 
that one person of the trinity should say, "I create good 
and I create evil," and another person of the trinity 
should say of natural evil, **An enemy hath done this."^ 
But no such harmony existed in the Jerusalem of Jesus. 
Under a teaching that symbolized the deity as the Sun, 
shining alike on the thankful and thankless, individu- 
ally, desiring no sacrifices, and concentrating human 
effort against the forces of evil in nature, in society — 
the evil principle — Jahveh falls like lightning from 
heaven. Like "the blameless man" of the "Wisdom of 
Solomon," Jesus "sets himself against the Wrath," 
however sanctified as the Wrath of God, and sees all 
sacrifices as eucharists of the Adversary. He not 
only repudiates the name "Jahveh," but tells the offi- 
cial agents of Jahvism that their god is his devil. (John 
viii. 44). 

Of course one can only refer cautiously to anything 
in the fourth Gospel, for it is a composite book, but it 
contains, as I believe, passages or fragments of the 
early apostolic theology, wherein dualism, until crushed 
by Paul, was prominent, and the good God repre- 
sented in hard struggle with Satan for the rescue of 
mankind. 

This aspect of the teaching of Jesus cannot be dealt 
with here as its importance deserves. We live in an 
age whose clergy deal apologetically with the promi- 
nence of the Adversary of Man in the teachings of 
Jesus. For this fundamental principle of Jesus Jewish 
monotheism has been substituted. But there are many 
records to attest that the moral perfection and benevo- 



THE LAST SOLOMON. 227 

lence of the deity, which is certainly inconsistent with 
his omnipotence, or his "permission" of the tares in 
nature, was the only new principle of religion affirmed 
by Jesus ; and, also, that it was so subversive of sacri- 
fices, priesthood, and the very foundations of the temple 
— all dependent on Jahveh's menaces — that the execu- 
tion of Jesus appears more rationally explicable by this 
dualistic propaganda than by any other ascribed to him. 

It was the birth of a new God that moved Jerusalem : 
a unique God in Judea — and almost unknown in mod- 
ern Christendom — namely, a good God. As the Ara- 
bian gospel significantly relates, the Eastern Wise Men 
came to the cradle of Jesus as that of a saviour "prophe- 
sied by Zoroaster," — the one prophet who separated 
deity from the realm of evil. 

It is now even unorthodox to deny that the agonies 
of nature are part of the providence of God : but herein 
orthodoxy is in direct antagonism to what it maintains 
as the authentic teaching of Jesus. "Then was brought 
unto him one possessed of a devil, blind and dumb ; and 
he healed him, insomuch that the dumb man spake and 
saw. And all the multitudes were amazed and said. Is 
this the Son of David ? But when the Pharisees heard 
it, they said. This man doth not cast out devils but by 
Beelzebub, the prince of devils. And knowing their 
thoughts he said. Every dominion divided against itself 
is brought to desolation ; and every city or house divided 
against itself shall not stand ; and if Satan casteth out 
Satan, be is divided against himself : how then shall his 
dominion stand ?" 

Those therefore who believe these to be the words of 
Jesus, and yet believe blindness, dumbness, and other 



228 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

physical diseases to be in any sense of divine providence 
or even permission, are believing in a God whom Jesus 
implicitly pronounced to be Satan. 

And those who do not believe that Jesus healed such 
diseases, nor believe in a personal Satan, may still 
regard the above legend as characteristic. The separa- 
tion of Good and Evil into eternally antagonistic domin- 
ions could not have been affirmed by any Jew other than 
Jesus (or John the Baptist, probably however an 
Oriental dervish.) Though the Jews popularly be- 
lieved in Beelzebub and other devils, they were all 
regarded as under the omnipotence and control of 
Jahveh, who proudly claimed that he was the creator 
of all evil, and who even had lying spirits in his employ. 

Whether Jesus believed in the personality of the evil 
principle, in any strict sense, may be questioned. He 
may have meant no more than Emerson, who pictured 
ill health as a ghoul preying on the heart and life of its 
victims. Memories of similar teachings may have 
given rise to the tales of healing afterwards associated 
with Jesus. But the personality of evil is a more philo- 
sophical generalization than the personification of a 
power representing both the good and the evil phe- 
nomena of nature. Evil acts in concrete forms, and 
often in combinations of forces which can not be 
analysed and distributed into particular causes. History 
records instances of moral epidemics driving whole peo- 
ples as if down a steep place into seas of blood, as if by 
some pandemoniac possession, impressing the ordinarily 
humane along with the vindictive, the lawless and 
destructive. A great deal of crime seems disinterested, 
and still more is due to the fanatical inspiration of cruel 
deities, whose names become in other religions the 



THE LAST SOLOMON. 229 

names of devils. Out of manifold experiences in the 
tragical annals of mankind came the terrible Ahriman. 

That Jesus did not adopt the Zoroastrian theology 
is shown in his hostility to sacrifices which are of vital 
importance in the Parsi system, though they were not 
of the cruel kind; nor, as we have seen, were they to 
propitiate gods, but to assist them. Moreover, belief in 
Ahriman had naturally evoked a militant spirit in the 
war against evil, and Jesus seems to have for this rea- 
son separated himself from the dervish, John the Bap- 
tist, whose violence had landed him in prison. The 
incident (Matt, xi.) is so wrapped in post-resurrectional 
phraseology that any rational interpretation must be 
conjectural ; but there is a certain accent about it which 
can hardly be explained as part of the evangelical doc- 
trine that the Baptist was a mere preface to Christ. 
Jesus seems to regard John the Baptizer as the ablest 
man of his time (verse 11), but as of a revolutionary 
spirit, as if the reformation were a siege against some 
political kingdom or throne. Violent people had been 
pressing around John, and the cause of spiritual libera- 
tion had suffered. There was too much of the old law 
with its thunders, too much of fiery Elijah, surviving in 
John. The ideal is not a thing to be clutched at, or 
taken by force, but all of the conditions — every tittle — 
must be fulfilled. (Luke xvi. 17.) 

This is in substance a doctrine of evolution as opposed 
to revolution, and my interpretation may be suspected 
of rationalistic anachronism ; but it must be remem- 
bered that the Golden Age behind Israel was an epoch 
of Peace, which was represented in the ancient name 
of their city (Salem), and of its greatest monarch, 
Solomon. The prophets had long been painting the 



230 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE, 

visionary dawn with pigments of that glorious sunset. 
Solomon, true to his name, had allowed dismember- 
ment of his kingdom rather than go to war against 
rebellion ; and it is noticeable that in the apMDstolic age 
there was a principle against carnal weapons, the Epistle 
to the Hebrews (xii. 3, 4) especially reminding the 
brethren of the patient endurance of Jesus, and com- 
mending their not having "resisted unto blood." This 
peacefulness of Jesus had indeed become a basis of the 
doctrine that the triumph of Jesus over Satan was con- 
ditioned on his not using any force, or other satanic 
weapon. Those who took to the sword would perish 
thereby — i. e., remain in sheol. 

But in a realm of practically oppressive and cruel 
superstitions, established and consecrated, an absolute 
appeal to the moral sentiment cannot escape being revo- 
lutionary. The American Anti-Slavery Society were 
non-resistants ; their great leader, William Lloyd Gar- 
rison, thus apostrophised his ''elder brother" of Jeru- 
salem : 

"O Jesus ! noblest of patriots, greatest of heroes, most 
glorious of all martyrs ! Thine is the spirit of universal 
liberty and love — of uncompromising hostility to every 
form of injustice and wrong. But not with weapons of 
death dost thou assault thy enemies, that they may be 
vanquished or destroyed; for thou dost not wrestle 
against flesh and blood, but against 'principalities, 
against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of 
this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places' ; 
therefore hast thou put on the whole armor of God, 
having the loins girt about with truth, and having on 
the breastplate of righteousness, and thy feet shod with 
the preparation of the gospel of peace, and going forth 



THE LAST SOLOMON. 231 

to battle with the shield of faith, the helmet of salva- 
tion, the sword of the Spirit ! Worthy of imitation art 
thou, in overcoming the evil that is in the world ; for by 
the shedding of thine own blood, but not even the blood 
of thy bitterest foe, shalt thou at last obtain a universal 
victory." 

So, across the ages, does deep answer unto deep. 
But all the same Garrison's feet were unconsciously 
shod with the preparation of the gospel of war, even as 
those of Jesus were. In a realm of consecrated wrong 
every appeal to the moral sentiment is necessarily revo- 
lutionary ; far more so than physical rebellion, against 
which preponderant moral forces combine with the 
immoral, as being a greater evil than the orderly wrong 
assailed. Satan cannot be cast out by Beelzebub. A 
god of wrath, enthroned on reeking altars, could bet- 
ter stand the axe of the Baptist than the sunbeam of 
Jesus, the arrow feathered with gentleness and culture. 
John the Baptist was not a religious martyr; he suf- 
fered from a ruler quite indifferent to his religion, with 
whose personal affairs he had interfered. But Jesus 
suffered because he proclaimed, with irresistible elo- 
quence, a new religion, one involving practically the 
existing institutions of the priesthood, and their whole 
moral system. It was virtually the setting up of a new 
deity in place of Jahveh, reason in place of the Bible, 
the heart worshipping in spirit and in truth in place of 
the temple, and humanizing the moral sentiment — turn- 
ing the conventional morality to "dead works" (Heb. 
vi. I ) . He expected the reform to be peaceful ! 

Rousseau's remark that Socrates died like a philoso- 
pher, but Jesus like a god, has in it a truth more im- 
portant than those who often quote it recognise. Jesus 



232 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

died, legendarily, so much like a god that it is difficult 
to make out just what happened to the man. Strong 
arguments have been made to prove that he did not die 
at all on "the cross" (a word unknown to the New 
Testament),* and that Pilate not only *'set himself" to 
save Jesus (John xix. 12), but succeeded. There may 
have been from the stake a despairing cry, afterwards 
shaped after a line from a psalm, but it can hardly be 
determined whether this may not have been part of the 
first post-resurrectional doctrine that the Son must be 
absolutely left by his divine Father, and pass unaided 
through the ordeal of Satan, in order to fulfil the con- 
ditions of a return from death. It is true, however, that 
this primitive idea had almost vanished when the earli- 
est Gospel was written, and, although a relic of it may 
have been preserved by tradition, there is an equal prob- 
ability that Jesus did utter at the stake a cry of despair. 
The whole miserable murderous affair, unforeseen and 
disappointing, must have appeared to him a horrible 
display of diabolism ; and even after his friends believed 
in his resurrection, and saw in the tragedy a sacrifice, 
they regarded it a sacrifice hateful to his Father, and 
exacted only by the Devil. 

Did he pray, ''Father forgive them, they know not 
what they do" ? Only Luke reports this ; its suppres- 
sion by the other Gospels suggests that its doctrinal 
significance was perceived. I heard a preacher in the 
church of the Jesuits at Rome argue that Judas him- 
self is now in Paradise, because Jesus thus prayed for 

* The word translated "cross" is axaupoSi a stake. The christian cross 
began its development by the carving of a figure of Jesus on the stake, 
which required a support for the arms. Protestantism, by removing the fig- 
ure, has left the wooden fetish, which, however, has been invested with Sym- 
bolical meanings, some derived from the various crosses held sacred in many 
countries long oefore Christ. 



THE LAST SOLOMON. 233 

those who slew him, and the prayer of the Son of God 
must have been answered. There is no apparent dog- 
matic purpose in this incident, and it may be true. 

The story of his confiding his mother to the disciple 
"whom he loved/' told only by John, is evidently meant 
to complete the assumption of a special favoritism 
towards that disciple, who is the type of the good Spirit 
on one side of Jesus in contrast with Judas, Satan's 
agent, on the other. The two are equally unhistorical 
and allegorical. John and Judas became the good and 
evil Wandering Jews of mediaeval folklore. 

The first Solomon had perished as a teacher of wis- 
dom when he was summoned from his tomb to utter the 
Jahvism of the ''Wisdom of Solomon" : the second and 
last Solomon was forever buried on the day when 
Mary Magdalene saw his apparition, and cried, "My 
master !" From that time may be dated the loss of the 
man Jesus, and restoration in Christ of the Jahvism 
whose burden the wise teacher had endeavored to lift 
from the heart and mind of the people. Vicisti Jahveh! 



CHAPTER XIX. 

POSTSCRIPTA. 

Early in the year 1896 a company of Jews performed 
at the Novelty Theatre, London, in the Hebrew lan- 
guage, a drama entitled "King Solomon." It was an 
humble affair, and only about three score in the audi- 
ence — I and one very dear to me being apparently the 
only "Gentiles" present. The drama was mainly the 
legend of the Judgment of Solomon and that of the 
visit of the Queen of Sheba, both conventionalized, and 
performed in an automatic way, no spark of human 
passion or emotion animating either of the women 
claiming the babe, or the Queen of Sheba. The part 
of Solomon was acted by a fine-looking man, who went 
through it in the same perfunctory way that character- 
ized Joseph Meyer, the Oberammergau Christ, as he 
appears to the undevout critical eye. Such has the 
biblical Solomon become in Europe. 

In the same week I attended a matinee of "Aladdin" 
in Drury Lane Theatre, which was crowded, mainly 
with children, who were filled with delight by the fairy 
play. The leading figures were elaborated from Solo- 
monic lore. A beautiful being in dazzling white rai- 
ment and crown appears to Aladdin ; she is a combina- 
tion of the Queen of Sheba and Wisdom ; she presents 
the youth with a ring (symbol of Solomon's espousal 
with Wisdom, or as the Abyssinians say, with the 

234 



POSTSCRIPTA, 235 

Queen of Sheba) ; by means of this ring he obtains the 
Wonderful Lamp (the reflected or terrestrial wisdom). 
An Asmodeus, well versed in modern jugglery, charms 
the audience with his tricks and antics, before pro- 
ceeding to get hold of the magic ring of Aladdin, and 
commanding the lamp, which he succeeds in doing, as 
he succeeded with Solomon. This is what legendary 
Solomon has become in Europe. 

In European Folklore, Solomon and his old adver- 
sary, Asmodeus, now better known as Mephistopheles, 
have long been blended. Solomon's seal was the 
mediaeval talisman to which the demon eagerly responds. 
The Wisdom involved is all a matter of magic. It is 
wonderful that so little recognition has been given in 
literature to the epical dignity and beauty of the bibli- 
cal legends of Solomon. In early English literature 
there was at one time a tendency to ascribe to Solomon 
various proverbs not in the Bible. In one old manu- 
script he is credited with saying : 

"Save a thief from the gallows and he'll help to hang thee." 

Also, 

"Many a one leads a hungry life, 
And yet must needs wed a wife." 

In Chaucer's ''Melibseus" there are ten proverbs 
ascribed to Solomon which are not in the Bible. But 
generally it is Solomon the magician who has interested 
the poets. In the old work, "Salomon and Saturn," the 
wise man informs Saturn that the most potent of all 
talismans is the Bible : 

"Golden is the Word of God, 

Stored with gems ; 
It hath silver leaves; 



236 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

Each one can, 
Through spiritual grace 
A Gospel relate." 

And it is further said, "Each (leaf) will subdue 
devils." In a profounder vein Solomon says: ''All 
Evil is from Fate ; yet a wise-minded man may moder- 
ate every fate with self-help, help of friends, and the 
divine spirit." 

In Prospero burying his Book, Shakespeare seems 
to have followed the rabbinical legend that after Solo- 
mon by his written formulas had made the devils serve 
him, in building the temple and other works, he resolved 
to practice magic no more, and buried his book. But 
the devils said to the people, "he only ruled you by his 
book," and pointed out where it was hidden ; so they 
left the prophets and followed magic. 

At what time the notion arose that Solomon had de- 
monic familiars does not appear, but the story in 
I Kings iii. of the gift of wisdom has some appear- 
ance of a reclamation for the deity of a credit that was 
popularly ascribed to a rival power. However this may 
be, there is a popular habit of tracing unusual hu- 
man performances to Satan. As I write this para- 
graph (in Paris) I note a theatrical placard announc- 
ing "les sataniques devins" of Williany de Torre, a man 
who cries out the name and address you secretly select 
in the Paris Directory. Why not advertise the divina- 
tions as "angelic" instead of satanic? The heavenly 
beings have somehow no great reputation for clever- 
ness. Probably this is due to the long association of 
intellectuality and science with heresy. 

The late Lord Lytton ("Owen Meredith") wrote a 



POSTSCRIPTA. 237 

brief poem on a version given him by Robert Browning 
of the story in my Preface, of Solomon leaning on 
his staff long after he was dead : a worm gnaws the 
end of the staff and Solomon falls, crumbled to dust, 
and nothing left visible but his crown. A poem by 
Leigh Hunt, *'The Inevitable" (in some editions, ''The 
Angel of Death"), tells of a man who, in terror of 
Death, entreats Solomon to transport him to the remot- 
est mountain of Cathay. Solomon does so. 

"Solomon wished and the man vanished straight; 
Up comes the Terror, with his orbs of fate: 
'Solomon,' with a lofty voice said he, 
'How came that man here, wasting time with thee? 
I was to fetch him ere the close of da}'-, 
From the remotest mountain of Cathay. 
Solomon said, bowing him to the ground, 
'Angel of death, there will the man be found.' " 

The story of the Fall of Man, in Genesis, so fasci- 
nated Schopenhauer that he was ready to forgive the 
Bible all its blunders. The whole world, said the great 
pessimist, looks like a vast accumulation of evil devel- 
oped from some absurdly small misstep. And this mis- 
step was precisely in accord with the philosophy of 
Schopenhauer, who says that the great mistake of the 
universe is "consciousness." 

That there were Schopenhaueresque ideas among 
some of the Solomonic school may be seen in Koheleth 
(Ecclesiastes), who says, ''Be not overwise; why com- 
mit suicide?" (vii. 16.) I have remarked elsewhere 
that the story of the serpent in Eden may have been 
put there as a fling at Solomon and the scientific people, 
but on the other hand it may be argued that it was a 
fable devised by the Solomonic school to show how 



238 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

Jahveh was outwitted in his attempt to breed a race of 
idiots, for fear mankind might become as clever as him- 
self. For it was not the serpent that deceived Adam 
and Eve, but Jahveh, in saying the forbidden fruit was 
fatal ; the serpent told them the truth. 

The folk-tale that Solomon's staff was gnawed by a 
worm, and his crowned body reduced to dust, suggests 
the idea of grandeur laid low by some insignificant form, 
and in the same way Jahveh's creation was overthrown 
by a worm. This humiliation of Jahveh has been now 
somewhat lessened by the theory that Satan took the 
form of the serpent, which Dante calls the worm, but 
nowhere in the Bible is there any confusion of the rep- 
tile in Eden with any devil. "If," says Kalisch, "the 
serpent represented Satan it would be extremely sur- 
prising that the former only was cursed, and that the 
latter is not even alluded to." In Genesis the extreme 
cleverness of the serpent is recognized, and the truth of 
his statement to Eve admitted, while Jahveh is shown 
in the ridiculous light of having his deception about the 
fruit exposed by a worm, and betaking himself to curses 
all round. These be thy gods, O Christians — for the 
Jews absolutely ignored the tale in all their scriptures, 
and in the New Testament Paul alone alludes to it.* 

The serpent in Eden is evidently the symbol of wis- 
dom, of medical art — Egyptian, Phoenician, Greek — 
lifted in the wilderness by Moses, and recognised by 
Jesus ("Be wise as serpents"), with whom as an up- 
lifted healer of mankind the serpent-symbol was asso- 
ciated. But all of this is in contradiction to the curses 

* Paul (i Tim. ii. 14), supposing him to have written the passage, uses the 
story simply to justify the subordination of woman to man, but a 
witty lady remarked, to me that according to the story in Genesis no harm 
came to the world by Eve's eating the fruit of knowledge. It was only by the 
man's eating it that the thorns sprang up. 



POSTSCRIPTA. 239 

of Jahveh on the serpent, and on those to whom the 
serpent brought wisdom. The fable, therefore, seems 
to be composed of two antagonistic parts ; it is a Solo- 
monic anti-Jahvist fable with an anti-Solomonic moral. 

In the Parsi religion the fall of man was due to the 
first man having been deceived by the Evil One into 
ascribing the good things in creation to him — the Evil 
One. 

In the same way the Christian ascribes to the Evil 
One man's first taste of wisdom — the knowledge of 
good and evil — and believes his first step above the 
brute to be a fall. 

In the Parsi religion that fall of man, by a lie, was 
recovered from by the creation of a new man. But in 
Christendom man has not recovered from his fall, nor 
can he ever recover from it so long as he disregards the 
new man's word, '*Be wise as serpents," and continues 
to confuse his wisdom with diabolism. 

Only through the tree of the knowledge of good and 
evil, and of the eternal antagonism between them, can 
the tree of Life be reached. 

In a Gnostic legend Solomon was summoned from 
his tomb and asked, "Who first named the name of 
God?" He answered, "The Devil." 

Did reason permit belief in a personal devil, one 
might recognise his supreme artifice in thus sheltering 
all the desolating cruelties of men, all the discords and 
wars that have degraded mankind into nations glorying 
in their ensigns of inhumanity, under a divine order. 
Thenceforth the enemy of man became God's Devil, 
and whoso accuses the scourges of man accuses the 
scourges of God. 



240 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

Under the teaching of the Second Solomon his per- 
sonal friends could see in his tragical death a blow of 
the Devil aimed at God, who was trying to subdue that 
lawless one, for whose existence or actions God was in 
no sense responsible. But this was a transient glimpse. 
The Devil's God was soon seen on his throne above the 
murderers of the great man; the stake set up by the 
lynchers was shaped into a symbolical cross; and all 
the cowardly, treacherous, murderous leaders, and the 
vile lynchers, are raised into agents and priests of God, 
presiding at a solemn rite and sacrifice for the salvation 
of mankind. 

Instead of salvation a curse fell on mankind with that 
lie, and there are no signs of recovery from it. By the 
combination of Church and State there has been evolved 
a new man — a Christian restoration of deceived Yima — 
and no theological development touches that misbeliever 
in every believer. The Unitarian, the Theist, in their 
doctrine of a divine cosmos, the optimist, the pantheist, 
do but rehabilitate and philosophically reinvest the lie 
that the diseases and agonies in nature and in history 
are parts of a divinely ordered universe. They, too, 
must see Judas and the lynchers carrying out the plans 
of God. What then can they say of our contemporary 
betrayers of justice, the national lynchers, who are cru- 
cifying humanity throughout the world? These, too, 
carrying along their missionaries, are projecting God 
into history! But it is the God who was first named 
by the Devil, as the risen Solomon said, not the ''Eloi," 
the source only of good, whom the great friend of man 
saw not in all that wild chaos of violence amid which he 
perished, and his sublime religion with him. 



POSTSCRIPTA. 241 

When Jahveh swears "by his holiness" (as in Ps. 
Ixxxix. 35, Amos iv. 2), this hoHness is not to be inter- 
preted as moral, or in any human sense. It relates to 
ancient philosophical ideas concerning the spiritual and 
the material worlds. The supreme head of the spiritual 
world is so far above the material world in majesty that 
he cannot come in contact with matter, though this 
august "holiness" has nothing to do wdth his moral 
character. Indeed deities were in all countries consid- 
ered quite above the moral obligations of men. 
Jahveh's "holiness" required the employment of medi- 
ators in creation — the Spirit of God brooding over the 
waters, Wisdom the "undefiled" master-builder, the 
Word — in each of whom is some image of his quasi- 
physiological "holiness," his transcendent imma- 
teriality. 

It was amid these ancient conceptions that the vari- 
ous cults arose which attempt to please and conciliate 
gods by ceremonial observances, runes, recited for- 
mulas of petition or adulation, all based on the awful 
"holiness" that doth hedge about a god, and concerned 
with points of heavenly etiquette, without any implica- 
tion of a moral nature in those distant celestial beings. 
In Euripides' "Iphigenia" (line 20) it is said: "Some- 
times the worship of the gods, not being conducted with 
exactness, overturns one's life." In the same vein 
Koheleth (Ecclesiastes, v. i, 2) : "Keep thy foot when 
thou goest into the house of God ; for to draw nigh to 
him with attention is better than to bring the sacrifices 
of fools who know not that they are ( ? may be) doing 
wrong. Be not rash w^ith thy mouth, and let not thy 
heart be hasty to utter a word before God ; for God is 



242 SOLOMONIC LITERATURE. 

in heaven, and thou on earth ; therefore let thy words 
be few." 

But in every race ethical development reaches a stage 
in which these majestic beings, concerned only about 
their worship according to etiquette, are challenged. 
Thus in the "Cyclops" of Euripides (xxxv. 3-5), Ulys- 
ses says : "O Jove, guardian of strangers, behold these 
things ; for if thou regardest them not, thou, Jove, being 
nought, art vainly esteemed a god." 

From the first Solomon to the last, the whole intellec- 
tual development in Judea, which I have called Solo- 
monic, means the subjection of all conceptions of the 
divine nature and laws to the moral sentiment and the 
reason of man. It was no denial of invisible beings, or 
of man's relation to the universe, but a demand that all 
definitions and conceptions should be approached 
through science, experience and wisdom. 

Solomon, and the Second Solomon, rest in their un- 
known graves ; their wisdom is corrupted ; but their 
genius survives in the earth. Of old it was said God 
looked down from heaven on the children of men, and 
found that there was "none that doeth good, no not 
one." But it is now man who, with eyes illumined by 
the brave and cultured Solomons of all lands and ages, 
looks upon the gods to see if there be one that doeth 
good. The best of them are defended only by a plea 
that evil is the mask of their benevolence. But it is not 
humanly moral to do evil that good may come. 

Our great Omar Khayyam, by Fitzgerald's help, says : 

" O Thou, who Man of baser earth didst make, 
And ev'n with Paradise devise the Snake: 

For all the Sin wherewith the face of Man 
Is blacken'd — Man's forgiveness give — and take!" 



POSTSCRIPTA. 243 

The agreement may be fair enough so far as it con- 
cerns Sin, in the theological sense, but no Omnipotence, 
with unlimited choice of means to ends, could be for- 
given for the agonies of nature, even did they result in 
benefits, — as generally they do not, so far as is known 
to the experience of mankind. 

It may be, as the American orator said, "An honest 
god's the noblest work of man" ; and innumerable 
hearts enshrine fair personal ideals under uncompre- 
hended names for deity ; but each such private ideal is 
unconsciously antagonistic to every "collectivist" deity 
to whom the creation or the government of the world is 
ascribed. 

The human heart kneels before its vision, and with 
Mary Magdalene cries Rabboni, My Master ; but The- 
ology recognizes only the perfunctory Rabbi, and car- 
ries her beloved off into union with thunder-god, war- 
god, or with a deified predatory Cosmos. Yet will not 
the heart be bereaved of its vision ; it still sees a smile 
of tenderness in the universe. And philosophy, though 
it regard that smile as a reflection of the heart's 
own love, may with all the more certainty itself find a 
religion in this maternal divinity in the earth, ever 
aspiring to its own supreme humanity. 

Solomon passes, Jesus passes, but the Wisdom they 
loved as Bride, as Mother, abides, however veiled in 
fables. She is still inspiring the unfinished work of 
creation, and her delight is with the children of men. 



INDEX. 



Abimelech, 178. 

Abishag, 12, 25, 45 et seq., 95. 

Abraham, 156. 

Absalom, 45. 

Abyssinians, 59. 

Ac^s, 167 et seq. 

Adam, 73. 

Adonijah, 7, 24, 36, 45, 95. 

Agur, t;ii 54 et seq. 

Ahasuerus, 119. 

Ahijah, 37. 

Ahithophel, 46. 

Ahura Mazda, 64, 75 et seq., 185 et 

seq. 
Akbar, 194. 
Aladdin, 234. 
Alford, 126, 162, 188. 
American Jahvists, 42. 
Ammon, 31. 
Anahita, 183. 

Armaiti, 62 et seq., 70 et seq., 125. 
Asmodeus, 186, 235. 
Asuga, 15. 
Augustine, 218. 
Avesta, the, 59 et seq. 

Baptism, 182 et seq., 187 et seq. 

Bar Jesus, 169. 

Bathsheba, 5 et seq., 17 et seq., 24, 

30, 48, 67, loi, 179 et seq. 
Ben Sira, Jesus, 68, 113, 152, 213. 
Bernstein, 47. 
Bethlehem, Star of, 183. 
Bible, the, as a fetish, 44; falsified, 

102; spurious sentences in the, 106. 
Birth-legends, 201. 
Blemish, without, 147. 
Boston, 41. 
Brooding spirit, 123. 
Budde, Professor Karl, 89. 



Buddha, 13, 15, 72, 80. 
Bunyan, 130. 

Carlyle, 209. 

Charlemagne, 22. 

Cheyne, Professor, 75, 107. 

Chezib, 47. 

Christ, 118, 137, 165 et seq., 166. See 

/esus. 
Christian nations, policy of, 57. 
Christism, 132. 
Cinderella, 96. 
Colenso, 37, 45. 
Comparative studies, 20. 
Cornill, Professor C. H., 89 et seq. 
Cross, the, 232. 

Darkness and light, 74 et seq. 

Darmesteter, 68, 83, 86. 

David, lineage of, 4; in his dotage, 

7, 12; last words uttered by, 8; 

son of, 207 et seq. 
Davidson, Dr., 132. 
Death, in the Solomonic proverbs 

81 ; in the Zoroastrian religion, 82. 
Deuteronomy 41 et seq. 
Devil, the, 132 et seq., 239. 
Didron, M., 125. 
Dillon, 54, 55. 
Dove, the, 147. 

Earth, 73. 

Ecclesiastes, 104 et seq. 
Ecclesiasticus, iii et seq. 
El-Elyon, 152. 
Elohim, 2, 26. 
Elohism, 74 et seq. 
Elyon, 141, 153. 
Emerson, 228. 



245 



246 INDEX. 

English tolerance toward idolatry, 

33, 195. 
Esau, 137. 
Esther, 62. 
Eucharist, 170. 
Eusebius, 132. 
Evil, personality of, 228. 
Ewald, 211. 

Faizi, the Persian poet, 88. 

Fall of man, 237. 

Fear-of-the-Lord wisdom, "Jl et seq. 

First-born, 134 et seq., 139 et seq. 

Folly, Dame, 75 et seq., 215. 

Fox, George, 136. 

Fravashis, 86. 

Frederick the Great, 85. 

Free agency, 116. 

Fritzsche, 112. 

Garrison, William Lloyd, 230. 

Gibbon, 115, 176. 

Gil Bias, 164. 

Goethe, io7- 

Gospel, the Fourth, 204. 

Hadad, 36. 

Harischandra, 144. 

Harvard University, 41. 

Hebrews, Epistle to the, 129 et seq. 

Herder, 90, 94. 

Hilkiah, 41. 

Hillel, 173- 

Holy Spirit, 124, 136 et seq., 184, 189, 

221. 
Hunt, Leigh, 237. 

Illegitimacy, 7. lo- 

Immortality, belief in, 80. 

Infancy, the, 201; Gospel of the, 151. 

Inman, Dr., 83. 

Isaiah, 195, 197. 



Jahveh, 2, 26, 38. 

Jahvism, 32, 54 et seq., 74 et seq., 89, 
106 et seq., iii et seq., 118 et seq., 
132, 143, 191, 194 et seq., 201 et 
seq., 208, 233. 

Jedidiah, i. 

Jemshid, 22. 



Jeremiah, 42, 135. 

Jeroboam, 37. 

Jerusalem, 34, 92. 

Jesus, 131, 135 et seq., 147,148.162; 
rebukes the Jahvist superstition, 
57; genealogies of, 150; the Paul- 
ine dehumanization of, 164 et seq.; 
the mythological mantle of Sol- 
omon fallen on, 176 et seq.; tempt- 
ation of, 189; as a God, 199 et seq.; 
Lazarus and, 202 et seq. ; sayings 
of, 212; in relation to woman, 214 
et seq.; His study of Ecclesiasti- 
cus, 216 et seq.; teachings of, 222 
et seq.; the realm of evil and, 225 ; 
separation of good and evil by, 
228. See Christ. 

Job, 51 et seq., 85, 144. 

John the Baptizer, 183 et seq. 

Josephus, 155, 159, 161. 

Josiah, 39. 

Judea, the bodily incarnation of a 
deity, 129. 

Justice, king of, 154. 

Koheleth, 67, 99, 104 et seq., 237. 

Lazarus, 177, 202 et seq. 
Lemuel, King, 67. 
Light and darkness, 74 et seq. 
Lytton, Lord, 236. 

Magdalene, Mary, 102, 190, 233. 
Mahol, 2. 
Martha, 190. 

Martineau, Russell, 93, 96. 
Mary, 189 et seq. 
Maurice, Rev. F. D., 104. 
Maya, 13. 

McGiffert, Dr., 134. 
Melchizedek, 120, 151 et seq. 
Mephistopheles, 235. 
Miracles, 165 et seq., 176 et seq. 
Missionary propagandism, 171. 

Most High, 141. 
Miiller, Max, 152. 

Nathan, 6 et seq. 
Necessity, 195. 
Neferhotap, 107. 



INDEX. 



247 



Newman, Professor, 196. 
Nicholson, Dr., 222. 

Oberammergau, 192, 234. 
Omar Khayyam, 71. 73. 76, 109, i73. 
195, 242. 

Paine, Thomas, 43. 

Parsi religion, 239. 

Passion Play, 193. 

Passion, the, 147. 

Paul, 80, 132 et seq., 166 et seq., 189, 

204 et seq. 
Peace, Prince of, 120, 160, 185. 
Peace, the queen of, 100. 
Persia, 62. 
Peter, 157. 

Petrie, Mr. Flinders, 28. 
Pharaoh-Necho, 39. 
Pharaoh's daughter, 28, 30. 
Pharisee, Simon the, 216. 
Philo, 125. 
Pilate, 232. 

Polycrates, ring of, 31. 
Preacher, the, 105 et seq. 
Proverbs, Book of, 59 et seq. 
Proverbs, Solomonic, 87. 
Psalter of Solomon, 118. 

Quakerism, 136. 

Read, General Meredith, 115. 
Rebekah, i"^. 
Renan, 92, 106, 121, 204. 
Resurrection from death, 128, 174, 

184. 
Reuben, 47. 
Renss, Edward, 89. 
Rezon, 36. 

Ring of Solomon, 185. 
Ring, legend of the, 99. 
Rousseau, 231. 

Sacrifices, human, 35. 135. 
Sadi, 115. 
Salem, 155 et seq. 
Samaritan woman, the, 219. 
Satan, 149. 

Satans, Solomon and the, 34. 
Saviour, the, 200 et seq. 
Scarlet Woman, 76. 



[ Schopenhauer, 237. 
Selah, 53. 
Sermon on the Mount, 213 etseq. 

219 et seq. 
Seven, Queen of the, 75. 
Seven Sages, the, 16 et seq. 
Seven, the number, 16 et seq., 61 et 

seq. 
Shakespeare, 118, 175, 216. 
Sheba, Queen of, 59 et seq... 121, 164, 

234- 

Shelah, 47 et seq. 

Shelley, 119. 

Sheol, 149. 

Shiloh, 49. 

Shulamith, 92 et seq., 95 et seq., 190. 

Shunammite, 19, 25. 

Simon, the Pharisee, 216, 

Sin, 172, 243. 

Sleeping Hero, 121. 

Smith, Joseph, the Mormon, 41. 

Solomon, mythology of, i; his wis- 
dom, 2; traditions concerning him, 
3 etseq.; judgment of, 14 et seq.; 
the Tibetan, 14, 19; the wives of, 
24 et seq., 36; not a sensualist, 27; 
commercial regime established by 
him, 29; his idolatry, 30 et seq.; 
his intermarriage with foreigners, 
27, 30; his ring, 31, 185, 237; the 
Satans and, 34 et seq.; in the 
Hexateuch, 41 et seq.; the Queen 
of Sheba and, 60 et seq.: Moslem 
mythology of, 64; writings as- 
cribed to him, 65 et seq.; his idol- 
atry, 77; his proverbs, 87; in the 
Song of Songs, 96 et seq.; his 
idolatrous views, 113; his worldly 
wisdom and ethics, 113 et seq.; 
evoked in The Wisdom of Solo- 
mon, 119 et seq.; in the Epistle to 
the Hebrews, 138 et seq.; trans- 
figured into a type of divine and 
eternal Sonship, 160; Christ and, 
161; his mythological mantle falls 
on Jesus, 176 et seq.; the heir of his 
Godhead, 194 et seq.; the second, 
200; the last, 207 et seq.; his cult, 
211; in European Folklore, 235; the 
folk-tale of his staff, 238. 



248 



INDEX. 



Solomonism, 51 et seq., in. 

Solon, 22. 

Soma plant, 157. 

Song of Songs, 89 et seq. 

Son of David, 120, 188, 207 et seq. 

Son of God, 142 et seq., 148. 

Son of Man, 72, 142 et seq., 148. 

Sophia Solomonios, 119 et seq. 

Soul, 85 et seq. 

South, Queen of the, 208 et seq. 

Spirit of God, development of the, 

122 et seq. 
Strickland, Agnes, 210. 
Sun-worship, 43. 
Supper, the Last, 170 et seq., 193. 

Talmudic legend, 10, 18, 30. 

Tamar, 48, 179. 

Temptation of Jesus, 189. 

Tennyson, 104. 

Theocratic principle, the, 129. 

Tirza, 92. 

Toleration, religious, 195.332. 

Transfiguration, the, 191. 

Tyndall, 105. 

Tzedek, 158. 

Underworld, the, 82. 
Uriah, the Hittite, 9, 30. 



Usinara, King, 146. 

Vanity of vanities, 105 et seq. 
Vaudeville songs, 91. 
Vendidad, 16, 72 et seq. 
Vice societies, 94. 
Virgin, the, 180 et seq. 
Visakha, 13, 18 et seq. 
Vistaspa, King, 65. 

Wace, 112. 

Wandering Jew, 119 et seq., 206. 
Will, freedom of the, 116. 
Wisdom, personification of, 68 et 

seq.; in cosmogony, 69; Book of, 

III et seq.; as the Mother, 125. 
Wisdom of Solomon, the book, 118 

et seq.; compared with the Epistle 

to the Hebrews, etc., 133. 
Wise Man, 159. 
Wise Men, 181 et seq. 
Woman, taken in adultery, 218. 
Word, the, 126 et seq. 
Wrath, the, 224. 

Zadok, 159. 

Zoroaster, 62, 71, 77, 82, 84, 135, 177, 

186 et seq., 195. 
Zoroastrian theology, 141, 229. 



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